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There are a lot of differing opinions about footer links, particularly how to optimize them.

One camp says that these links should be innocuous, brand-name only links (i.e. alt tags that are your domain name or corporate name). Too many optimized inbound links (or alt tags on images that link to your site) could cause some sort of over-optimization penalty. While I think this is solid advice, I too have seen companies use highly optimized site-wide footer links, and they seem to be beneficial...so I'm not inclined to say that footer links shouldn't be optimized at all.

Another camp argues that you should go ahead and optimize all the link text, but to do so slowly and naturally. My concern with this approach is outlined above...at some point, you're going to have dozens or hundreds of links pointing to your site with optimized text/alt tags. That's not necessarily natural.

A middle-of-the road approach is to just change some of the links, and if I were you this is how I'd start. I'd identify the most trusted sites, change the alt tags on half of them to something optimized, then sit back and wait 3 months.

Additionally, I've always been of the opinion that one good footer link on a website's homepage - or an in-text link on the client's "about" page - is more valuable than a site-wide footer link. While I don't have any proof of this, it's something you might test. On sites we design, we like to put an "about this website" sub-heading on the client's about page, then link to our site in that text. It seems natural to me, and my site does OK.

Anyways, good luck. Whatever you do, I think gradual change is the key.

It's nots a "bad" thing to post the articles in two places, as this type of syndication is somewhat commonplace in the corporate world. Provided your site already as a lot of content and is generally good quality, there's no risk of a penalty for syndicating content.

However, I would encourage management to look at it from the user's perspective: If the user reads the article in the magazine, they're not going to find it very useful to see the same article again on your site. Conversely, if your website visitors aren't going to see the article in the magazine first, why send it to the magazine at all?

One solution is to quote a snippet of the original magazine article on your site, and then write a 200+  word summary or intro for the magazine article that perhaps summarizes the key points, introduces the article in a different way, etc., and then links to the magazine.

From a user's perspective, all the content you've published on your site and in the magazine is unique and potentially useful. From the SEO perspective, there's no possibility of an issue and - unlike syndication - you're adding a unique page of content to your site that is highly likely to be indexed and help you in the long run.

Syndication isn't bad, but you have to ask why you're doing it in the first place. It's often just as easy to create a short "What You'll Learn In This Article" intro on your site than it is to cut-and-paste.

I see no possibility of a penalty as it sounds like these domains were purchased just to grab type-in traffic, protect the product and brand, etc. This is natural and logical behavior.

Unless you're actively building links to one or more of these redirected domains (something that spammers do), I think you can sleep easy.

If you want to be extra careful, you could monitor backlinks to all the domains you've got redirected and make sure that no one is linking to them...but if your site already has a good link profile and trust with Google, I'd say who cares.