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Hey Rand, thanks for the info.  I did notice that OSE is counting them as links as well.  Do you think this is an issue in my scenario?  Would I be better off no-indexing the "duplicate" product pages on the non-primary sites?

As a fake example, imagine I sell sewing machines on one site, arts and crafts on another.  There is some overlap in products between these two industries, so it makes sense to show (as an example) yarn on both sites.  However since the product pages are the same, you would want to avoid duplicate content being indexed.  Do you think rel canonical or noindex is a better solution?

I run several ecommerce websites, and there is some overlap in the products offered between sites.  To solve this duplicate content issue, I use a cross-domain rel canonical so that there is only 1 authoritative page per product, even if it is sold on multiple sites.

However, I am noticing that my inbound link profile is massively expanding because Google sees these as inbound links.  The top linking domains for my site are all owned by me, even though there are not any actual links between the sites.

Has anyone else experienced this?

We would like to have others use the guide on their sites, but I am having trouble coming up with ways to promote it to those sites for their use.  Any ideas?

Sorry, maybe I should clarify.  We are not trying to sell the guide, we want to give it away for free.  We are just looking for ways to publicize it.  Of course, we will include it on our site, but I was trying to get ideas on other ways to promote it.

My company has developed a detailed white paper/buyers guide for a specific type of widget that we sell, and we're looking for creative ways to market this content.  We will be marketing it on our blog, plus via our ecommerce store's navigation.  Any other suggestions?

Since it is a duplicate and meant for mobile devices, then yes, I would use a canonical tag or even noindex if you don't want it in the index anyway.  Either method would eliminate the duplicate content problem.

Is the page with device=iphone&c=y different than example.html?  If not, you should make sure to add the canonical tag to it.  If it is different, then you shouldn't add it because it's not a duplicate.

Anyway to dig in to see what search engine those referring keywords come from?  Like craven22 said, it might be an image search.

Sounds like a bot or scraper to me.  That's strange because usually bots/scrapers don't execute javascript which is needed to show up in Google Analytics.  What analytics package do you use?

I think the advice in that article is still relevant today.  Create a footer link to the "website credits" page, and give yourself a link from THAT page.

You don't need to worry about some sort of duplicate content penalty for using the same image/filename all over your site.  This is common practice, for example, Amazon uses the same logo image file on every page of their site.

We have had good luck with the SEO package from PRWeb, although it is pretty pricey.

Sounds like a bot or scraper to me.  That's strange because usually bots/scrapers don't execute javascript which is needed to show up in Google Analytics.  What analytics package do you use?

Make sure to use a 301-redirect and you shouldn't have any problems.  If those domain have any existing links, then the 301 will also pass most of the link juice to your primary domain.

It doesn't hurt to have them, but I don't think there is any real benefit to them anymore for the search engines.  They should be able to find all of your pages by following the regular links on your site.  That being said, I still have them on my sites.

Our press releases have been picked up by many online sources and we got some do-followed links from them.

Hard to say, I doubt you would be penalized for only incoming links if your site is clean. But you may always have that history. You could add the site to webmaster tools and submit a reinclusion request explaining the situation. They maybe be able to "wipe the slate clean" for you.

here's a great post from SEOmoz about it: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not

I think the advice in that article is still relevant today.  Create a footer link to the "website credits" page, and give yourself a link from THAT page.

I think business.com directory links are valuable.  Check the mozRank of the page that your link would be on and make your decision based on that.