Taxonomy and splitting votes

I've been doing quite a lot of seo tweaking to various Drupal sites over the past few years. I've run into an issue that I would like to throw out for discussion. On the one hand, taxonomy is great for categorizing your site, getting crawled and helping engines understand your clusters of content. On the other hand, all of those taxonomy links in posts are internal site "votes" for taxonomy listing pages which might or might not be the key search engine target pages for those concepts. In my experience, it's good to have defined the pages that are the primary targets for inbound hits from search engines.

For example, you might have a page about compact cars that is your primary target page for this concept. You would want all other pages related to this page to "vote" for this page by linking to it. But, the taxonomy links "vote" for the taxonomy listing page for that concept "compact cars." This even becomes more difficult to manage when the marketing folks get involved and want to really have a primary page from a design/content perspective about their compact car products. They'll go crazy if searchers are being directed to a taxonomy listing of "possibly" relevant pages by term.

I've been working on getting breadcrumb link pieces (tied to taxonomy terms) to vote for various target pages and not link to the taxonomy listing using the taxonomy breadcrumb module. Good stuff. But I started wondering about the taxonomy links at the bottom of pages. Should they "vote" for a defined target page or link to the taxonomy listing? Or a mix of both?

I'm not so worried about engines crawling the taxonomy related pages, but I am worried about splitting votes and having searchers going to lesser pages. Using taxonomy context provides a nice mechanism for engines to crawl the site and get into the taxonomy heirarchy. I'm just concerned that nodes voting for taxonomy listing pages might not be as productive as having terms vote for target pages.

I know you can setup overview type pages with taxonomy context, but they never seem simple enough for end-users etc. to grasp -- also you have to give out taxonomy administer privs to edit them. Just creating pages, tagging them and maybe putting them into the menu structure is about all I try to ask for from end-users. To get users to start grappling with the workings of taxonomy always seems like a bad move. I try to set it up to be as simple as possible.

As with all taxonomy and seo efforts, I could just be losing my mind! But seriously, is there a downside to all of this linking to taxonomy term listings? I sometimes feel that the alinks module is more beneficial for seo than taxonomy since it lets you create a vocabulary of keywords that all "vote" in a pre-determined way. Easy for users and admins to setup.

Ok, don't sugar coat it, let me have it!