Some great points here. I googled this to find the answer regarding canonical directives.

Do you think it is completely unwise to link to your external sites or blogs then? If not playing the steemit game and merely having the external links in the footer for example, you could create some decent outbound links for which "genuine" users could refer to.

This hub and spoke you spoke of... Is this where you'd have a cornerstone piece of content such as "the a-z of steemit" and then you'd create content linking to the subcategories all around it?

Thanks
Mitch