Today, when a new web site is launched, it will take a while before its pages get crawled and indexed in Google. With the increasing strain on hardware and resources due to the rapid growth of new sites, Google has become very strict in its policy of admitting sites and retaining web pages of sites in its index. It is a case of survival of the fittest in cyberspace.

Some of the basic facts to be borne in mind when looking at the issue in its entirety are:

• The Page rank is proportional to the total number of pages in Google’s index
• The page rank gained by a site depends on the number of inbound and outbound links to that site
• To increase its page rank, a site must build more pages and increase its virtual real estate

When a new site is launched, the number of backlinks to that site is negligible unless the business is well known and has a credible following offline and is launching its brand online. The average site owner has to set about building an external link profile by submitting to directories, guest blogging on well established industry relevant blogs, providing a platform for user generated content on her site, promoting site badges etc etc.

All this takes time and effort and it is a slow and steady natural growth. There are several link building software programs that promise instant deliverance by helping you build multitude of links in no time. The problem with this approach is that an average human cannot acquire 100 links in a day (read 8 hours of work time). Google also knows this and it is an easy recipe for raising a red flag.

Coming to the crux of the issue, creating and growing the number of pages on your site is relatively easy as you, the site owner, have full control over it. If you are passionate about your industry with good working knowledge, you can build lots of content over a short span of time. But this alone will not make the cut in today’s circumstances for making it into the Google index and being retained and ranked over time.

The most powerful links that can be obtained today are editorial links. When another site owner regards your site content as one of high quality and decides to link to from her blog or site, it is clearly a double thumbs up for your content and Google will also consider it seriously. A great linkbait program can help your site gain lots of natural inbound links from the linkerati.

If you have votes from other sites in the form of backlinks to the various pages of your site, this is crucial in Google retaining those pages in its index. Again, you cannot produce top quality content across all pages of your site as the subject being discussed can be limited in scope or not very popular in the eyes of users.

I have been noticing of late that even powerful domains with several product pages with wafer thin content and footer heavy links do not pass muster to be admitted/retained in the index. It is becoming increasingly clear that each individual page must attain a certain pagerank threshold to be retained in the index. This clearly proves that things cannot be taken for granted. Also, well established sites cannot afford to rest on their laurels any more.

To achieve a minimum pagerank threshold, internal linking can help to an extent and you as the site owner can do your bit to this end. But it is very vital to get a link from external unbiased sources to derive some link juice that can boost the pagerank of the page in question.

If the momentum on “natural” external link building profile of your website is maintained at a steady level from the inception of your website to its current state, you can expect Google to maintain a decent indexation level of your site and update its index regularly with the fresh content and growing number of pages offered by your site.

Rand in his Whiteboard presentation on Link Growth Patterns explains the relationship between link growth patterns and indexation levels.

Eric Enge in his post on The Disproportionate Value of Deep Links talks about improving the pagerank flow to hitherto areas of the site where there was no link juice flowing before.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland seo firm offering both search engine optimisation and ppc services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

The entire domain’s authority and trust is reflected by this page rank value. The home page then tends to distribute this page rank to the first level (categories), the second level (sub-categories) and the third level product pages which we often refer to as link juice. In general, the first level pages tend to derive the maximum link juice from the home page. But in a site with excessive number of sub-categories and product pages (money pages), the pagerank distribution is not proportional with some gaining link juice and a large majority not gaining any.

I am not delving into pagerank sculpting which was the rage of the SEO industry not long ago. This method was adopted to make certain areas of a site more powerful by flowing link juice from the home page preferentially to pages of interest (possible commercial intent). The internal linking architecture is altered from its natural form to highlight more important pages than the rest on the site.

In my opinion, internal linking with appropriate anchor text can be used to improve the ranking of pages within a site but this has its limitations. Integrating a blog with the main site so that it forms part of the global site template is vital. The different posts on the site blog can point to different pages of the site to flow some much needed link juice to prop select pages up and assist them in getting indexed by Google and ranked on the SERPs.

Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting has done some research in regards to distribution of domain authority and trust to pages on the lower level pages of a site. Let us assume you have a site selling products. You have the home page, many categories with respective sub-categories and product pages in that order. Let us consider an example where you sell Canon digital cameras as shown below.

The specific product page in question is listed on Page 4. You are not happy as this product page has not recorded any page rank. If it does not have the requisite page rank, there is a possibility that it will not gain entry into the Google index.

In this scenario, it is evident that the site despite a great PR of 6 is not able to flow link juice into this specific product page. Eric has found out in his experiments that an inbbound link to this deep page with appropriate anchor text (in this case EOS D7 Canon Digital Camera Review) from an external site is a huge help to get this product page into the index and help get it ranked. The link may not be of superior quality yet it helps a great deal.

As we all know, every inbound link is a vote to the site and the search engines recognise this as a strong signal. The search engines adjust their algorithm accordingly to flow more internal link juice into the page which has gained inbouind links. The more the merrier seems to be the case.

In our example, the Canon EOS D7 product page ends up gaining link juice thus helping it enter the Google index and get ranked over time. Deep inbound links help a site distribute more authority and trust to pages that receive such inbound links. This is a classic case of an inbound link triggering a tunnel of sorts to flow a site’s internal link juice to select pages at a lower hierarchy level.

In summary, you do not need masses of links to get your third level or product pages indexed and ranked on the SERPs. Just a few inbound links will facilitate better flow of the site’s domain authority and trust (read link juice) to the specific page recipient of the inbound links in question. You can read the post on impact of deep inbound links on a site’s lower level pages on Eric’s site.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine marketing company offering both seo and pay per click services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

I will be discussing only the top 4 factors under each section with a mention of the value score allotted by the SEO professionals . This biennial survey by Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz picks the brains of the top 72 SEO professionals from all over the world and their collective wisdom is presented in this post.

I) Link Building Tactics For SEO:

1)Link Bait And Viral Content Creation: 67% Very High Value
Just as all links are not created equal, all content created on the web is certainly not equal. There are certain pieces of content that are so well researched and presented in an interesting fashion that most readers fancy and take a liking to. They end up distributing it across the cybersphere through social media networks and emails.

The virality aspect is in the nature of the content itself, be it a 400 word ingenious piece titled
“10 ways to [solve a specific problem faced by people world over]” or a catchy video that captures the imagination of users. A recent example that comes to mind is the babies skating around in their nappies in an advertisement for a French water brand.

All this results in a massive surge of backlinks to the site which published this piece of content. There is a huge spike in traffic to the original website. The search engines love the natural scheme in which the backlinks are generated. Users follow links to read/watch the content. It is a win-win situation for all.

2) Blogging And Engagement With The Blogosphere: 66% high value
The influence of blogging cannot be stressed enough in the cyberworld. It is an incredible way for a “domain expert” to share knowledge and get valuable feedback from readers in the form of comments. Blogging is a long term process and it takes time and effort for a blogger to establish a good relationship with her readers and fellow bloggers in her chosen niche.

The popularity of a blog can be ascertained from the number of readers subscribed to the RSS feed and the activity taking place on the blog itself by way of exchange of comments between the blogger and readers. Over time, the blogger earns the reputation of a respected authority in her domain and develops a loyal band of committed followers.

The high quality and originality of her blog posts will result in posts getting tweeted over Twitter and passed around other popular social media networks. Each mention of the post on the web is a vote for the source site as far as search engines are concerned. Atleast, a tweet on Twitter ensures that the post is indexed by Google which scours the Twitter landscape actively even if the traditional blog and ping service is not being used.

Being a guest blogger on other popular blogs in the same niche or participating in blog carnivals can bring lot more exposure and hence traffic to a niche blogger’s site.

3) Classic “Create Valuable Content” Strategies: 58% High Value
Content that is original and written in a polished style stands out amongst the fluff that floats around in the cyberworld. Most times, it is borne out of practical knowledge of the author in a particular niche. As the saying goes – “Knowledge borne out of experience is wisdom”, the same goes for content that is written based on experiences gleaned by the domain expert through day to day application of the techniques described therein.

4) Public Relations: 56% High Value
Press Release (PR) is the first thing that comes to mind when public relations is mentioned. This is a powerful tool that can generate great backlinks and mentions if executed correctly. Traditionally, press releases that are interesting and absorbing catch the eye of journalists covering that niche who in turn refer to it in the news column they author. The higher the status enjoyed by the newspaper, the wider the exposure gained by the press release.

Sadly, this powerful tool has not been wielded well as a many press releases end up being pretty much self hype harping on the virtues of the company and the owners rather than dwell on the important part – the uniqueness of the product or service offered.

Beyond press releases, Jessica Bowman states that public relation departments and agencies are not up to speed when it comes to maximising the opportunities for search engine rankings.

II) Factors Affecting Value Of An External Link:

1) Trust Of The Source Domain: 70% Very High Value
The trustrank concept is based on the fact that good and trusted sites are linked together at the core of the web and that spam pervades outside this central area of good neighborhood. It is based on a Stanford University research paper titled Combating Webspam With Trustrank

The search engines caluclate Trustrank as an iterative Pagerank type of metric that flows link juice from a bunch of trusted seed sites to determine if a domain is trustworthy or not.

Another way of looking at it is the number of hops the domain in question is away from the trusted seed site. If it is within a limited number of hops from the seed site, then it can be considered to be high in trust. My earlier post titled Relationship Between Trust and Link Building talks about this aspect at length.

If this cannot be determined algorithmically, there is a possibility that human reviewers could confirm this aspect by looking at the percentage of links to and from a domain that link to good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods.

2) Global Authority/Importance of Source Domain: 68% Very High Value
The authority of the source domain is an important criterion that adds more value to the quality of the link emanating from it. The domain authority is a hybrid combination of the quality of links coming into it, domain trust and age of the domain.

The quality of links is influenced by the links coming into a site from other powerful well trusted domains. The strengthening of the good neighborhood aspect is vital to the good ranking of the site in question on the SERPs.

3) Keyword Anchor Text Of The Link: 67% Very High Value
The words that form part of the clickable link is generally referred to as the anchor text. Typically, the anchor text confirms to the search engines the nature of a page with respect to its content and whether the link that describes the page in question really is representative of it.

Internal linking within a site gives a good idea of the nature of the content to search engines. But it is the anchor text in external links that really reinforces the initial confrimation of the search engines. If you have a great article on blue widgets, then the inbound links from external unbiased sources that have blue widgets as part of their anchor text provides a lot of value to the recipient site and goes a long way to help it get ranked well in the SERPs.

The context in which the link appears on a page is also vital. If it is an editorial link from an external site where the author writes about a certain topic and contextually links to an article on your site, it clearly shows Google that your article is a great benchmark in that particular niche and one that often gets referred to in other posts and articles on the web. Such natural links have the highest value in Google’s eyes and these links are equally hard to obtain.

4) Quantity of Pagerank Passed By The Link: 59% High Value
If a page has a Pagerank of 5 points and if there are 5 links going out from that page, then each link ideally gets 1 pagerank point (Pagerank of a page / number of links on that page), provided none of the links going out of that page are nofollowed.

If your site gets an editorial link on a highly trusted strong domain page with high Pagerank, the amount of link juice passed by that link to your site is quite high and your site gets the ultimate benefit from such a link. Such a high quality link can be considered equivalent to a few hundred links from mediocre sites.

From the observations of many seo gurus in the past, it is ideal to have 100 or less links typically on any given page in order to distribute the pagerank as fairly as possible from the home page to the category and sub-category pages.

Search engines nowadays tend to ignore the navbar and footer links to a large extent. It is clear that the position of the link on a given page is important to be considered in the link graph calculations of the site by the search engines.

Instead of using nofollow links, a site owner can design her site in such a way that the important parts of her site are given prominence in the site architecture hierarchy and page consolidation is done for less important areas of the site.

For a detailed account of all the link factors that influence search engine rankings, Rand’s post titled
Effectiveness of ilink building tactics for SEO is an illuminating read and can whet your appetite for more knowledge on the ubiquitous links that form the basis of the world wide web.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine marketing company that provides both seo services and pay per click services to its clients New Zealand and Australia wide.

This threw the SEO world into a tizzy with lot of power SEOs blogging about their concerns. Danny Sullivan’s post on Google Loses Backward Compatibility was an interesting one.

Matt Cutts cleared the air in his post on PR sculpting on his blog. Rand Fishkin has posted a video on PR leak at SEOmoz. Bruce Clay has recorded Matt’s comments on PR sculpting on his post.

All this information notwithstanding, at this stage, it is not very prudent to read too much into the new meaning that the nofollow link has assumed with respect to pagerank. A year ago, if a page had 10 points of page rank, with 10 links (external or internal is not important) on the page out of which 5 are nofollowed, the 5 followed links got 2 points of page rank flowing through them.

But in the new scheme of things, in the above scenario, the 5 followed links get only 1 point each and the remaining 5 points of pagerank evaporate. The term evaporate as it stands today is very ambiguous and does not really explain many things.

My understanding is that there is not infinite pagerank to flow across the web. It is proportional to the number of pages in Google’s index. If we look at Pagerank as a pie, the sites with PR10, PR9 and PR8 constitute huge slices of the Pagerank pie. The remaining portion of this pie is distributed across the millions of other sites on the web.

If a PR3 site wants to increase its pagerank to the next level, then it has to create lot more pages of content and therefore own more virtual real estate than its competitor who is sitting on a PR4. Apart from this, other factors like the authority and trust of the domain, quality of backlinks etc also come into play. All these factors are clubbed together into the toolbar page rank of a site.

SEOmoz’s Mozbar tends to give a more accurate picture by breaking up the TBPR (toolbar pagerank) into its constituents namely pagerank at the page level, trust at the page level, page rank at the domain level, trust at the domain level and the number of extrernal links from unique domains.

Going by the theory that pagerank is not an infinite quantity, the law of conservation of energy in science states that energy disappearing in one form reappears in an exactly equivalent form. In the same vein, the page rank evaporating from the nofollowed links on a page must be compensated by distribution of the evaporated pagerank elsewhere on the page instead of disappearing into thin air.

If there were outbound links to good quality resources with the same topical focus as the content on the original page, it would help in the distribution of the evaporated pagerank and remain useful to the users. It also leads to better quality authoritative relevant content and reinforces Google’s vision – provide good quality relevant results to searchers.

Over the years, webmasters have been reluctant to link to good quality sources from their sites. The use of excessive internal pagerank sculpting to flow link juice to important pages on their sites using the nofollow tag has sidelined the “perceived less important pages” on their sites. The concept of pagerank revolves around linking. The new measures adopted by Google could be to encourage sites to link more to trusted authoritative sources in their domain of expertise.

The increasing incidence of use of nofollow tags in links to external sites has also contributed to this quandary. The original intention behind nofollow was to use this tag to link to untrusted sources. They could be user generated comments, paid links, signup pages, links to RSS feeds etc. But the sole purpose the nofollow tag has served has been to channel link juice to specific money pages on a site to make them more powerful so that they can rank well in the search results.

Google has also come across cases where inexperienced site owners have done more harm to their site by using nofollow injudiciously that they have blocked off good quality content from the Google index. This is to the detriment of Google’s vision in providing quality relevant content to users. This can be disputed as the good quality content can be linked to, from other sites on the web. Google still knows the existence of such pages and can even rank them on the weight of the anchor text of the inbound links.

Matt Cutts admitted that Google started evaporating pagerank over a year ago. There are lots of sites (especially large ones) who have done internal page rank sculpting on their sites to flow link juice to their most important pages. There has been no significant report of sites losing their pagerank in this period en masse.

There are two other important issues that hinge around the value of Pagerank. They are:

1. The inclusion of pages in the Google index is dependent on a pagerank threshold value the page must accumulate to be worthy of being admitted into the index
2. The crawling of pages on a site is also dependent on the page rank threshold

Assuming that the pagerank evaporates from a page with a good PR score due to presence of nofollowed links, would the subsequent decrease in the pagerank cause problems for that page to be crawled in future? Would excessive evaporation lead to the page thrown out of the Google index? It is very difficult to analyse such factors and your guess is as good as mine.

Danny Sullivan made a comment on Matt’s blog wherein he points out that all links are not created the same on a given site. Google uses its own techniques to measure the importance of links and their ability to flow juice. Webmasters in their earnestness to adopt pagerank sculpting use the nofollow on links which, if followed, might still get credit from Google’s algorithm. But their manual intervention snuffs it out.

In a subtle way, Google is maybe reminding webmasters and site owners that they should stop being search engineers by trying to channelise pagerank flow and concentrate more on their business, developing quality content and improving traffic and conversions.

Michael Martinez in a post on SEOmoz had an interesting comment to make. He said that the TBPR is not an accurate reliable measure of the pagerank of a site/page. Internal pagerank sculpting has been pursued by SEOs across the board based on the TBPR score. He says that a technique based on faulty measurement will only lead to inaccurate results. It is akin to chasing rainbows. This is offset by Rand who has clearly stated that internal page rank sculpting has worked wonders for his clients.

Matt Cutts weighs in when he says that it is highly desirable to plan a good site architecture right from the inception stage of a website. The architecture should take care of the site hierarchy by providing links to important pages using a natural linking style rather than use nofollow to achieve the same results.

With all these deliberations going on in the SEOsphere, it would be ideal for SEO practitioners to avoid excessive use of nofollow from now onwards in their future assignments. If they have used nofollow in the past on client sites for internal page rank sculpting and there has been no outcry to date, it is best to leave them as is rather than undo all the nofollowing. More importance should be given to the planning of the site/information architecture to link naturally to important pages on the site.

Again, it is early days to fully understand the effects of pagerank evaporation. Many SEO experts have been testing this and their pronouncements should be awaited eagerly.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior search marketing consultant at Netconcepts, our Auckland pay per click (ppc) marketing company in New Zealand. He also posts regularly to the Online Marketer blog at www.onlinemarketer.co.nz

Can you keep a secret? There is an unfair advantage. Amazon is applying conditional 301 URL redirects through their massive affiliate marketing program.

Most online merchants outsource the management and administration of their affiliate program to a provider who tracks all affiliate activity, using special tracking URLs. These URLs typically break the link association between affiliate and merchant site pages. As a result, most natural search traffic comes from brand related keywords, as opposed to long tail keywords. Most merchants can only imagine the sudden natural search boost they’d get from their tens of thousands of existing affiliate sites deeply linking to their website pages with great anchor text. But not Amazon!

Amazon’s affiliate (“associate”) program is fully integrated into the website. So the URL that you get by clicking from Guy Kawasaki’s blog for example to buy one of his favorite books from Amazon doesn’t route you through a third party tracking URL, as would be the case with most merchant affilate programs. Instead, you’ll find it links to an Amazon.com URL (to be precise: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060521996/guykawasakico-20), with the notable associate’s name at the end of the URL so Guy can earn his commission.

However, refresh that page with your browser’s Googlebot User Agent detection turned on, and you’ll see what Googlebot (and others) get when they request that same URL: http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business-Essentials/dp/0060521996 delivered via a 301 redirect script. That’s the same URL that shows up in Google when you search for this book title.

So if you are a human coming in from affiliate land, you get one URL used to track your referrer’s commission. If you are a bot visiting this URL, you are told these URLs now redirect to the keyword URLs. In this way, Amazon is able to have its cake and eat it too – provide an owned and operated affiliate management system while harvesting the PageRank from millions of deep affiliate backlinks to maximize their ranking visibility in your long tail search query.

(Note I’ve abstained from hyperlinking these URLs so bots crawling this content do not further entrench Amazon’s ranking on these URLs, although they are already #4 in the query above!).

So is this strategy ethical? Conditional redirects are a no-no because it sends mixed signals to the engine – is the URL permanently moved or not? If it is, but only for bots, then you are crossing the SEO line. But in Amazon’s case it appears searchers as well as general site users also get the keyword URL, so it is merely the affiliate users that get an “old” URL. If that’s the case across the board, it would be difficult to argue Amazon is abusing this concept, but rather have cleverly engineered a solution to a visibility problem that other merchants would replicate if they could. In fact, from a searcher perspective, were it not for Amazon, many long tail product queries consumers conduct would return zero recognizable retail brands to buy from, with all due respect to PriceGrabber, DealTime, BizRate, NexTag, and eBay.

As a result of this long tail strategy, I’d speculate that Amazon’s natural search keyword traffic distribution looks more like 40/60 brand to non-brand, rather than the typical 80/20 or 90/10 distribution curve most merchants (who lack affiliate search benefits) receive.

Brian

• Publish high-quality, well-captioned images;
• Have pages which already have good PageRank (use traditional SEO to achieve);
• Create a Google Video Sitemap;
• Update business listings in Local Business Center;
• Submit your feed to Google Product Search;
• Create a high-quality company blog;

As you may recall, I’ve previously recommended using Flickr for image search optimization, partly because it was quite beneficial for building some PageRank, and I’ve also delivered a presentation about this same concept at a number of SES conferences during the past couple of years. (As you may know, getting sites with good PageRank to link to your pages helps to grow your own site’s rankings in search results in Google and other search engines. “NOFOLLOW” is a parameter that search engines developed to allow webmasters to specify links which should NOT confer PageRank — they did this as a means of reducing incentives for unethical or over-aggressive people to spam links through blogs, comments and other sites and interfaces.)

It’s important to note that Flickr continues to be beneficial as part of a search marketing program even if they have revoked their “link love”. There’s large amounts of usage inside Flickr, and those users can click through to your site. Also, the photo profile pages are loved by Google and Yahoo, so the pages get indexed and searchers click through from the search engines to your photo pages and then can still click through to your site. Referral traffic from Flickr can be significant, depending on the type of photos you have and how well you’ve optimized the profile pages.

Jeff noted that Flickr has yet to NOFOLLOW links on Set and Collection descriptions. I also notice that links on your user Profile pages still confer PageRank, too. (You can see this on my Flickr profile page.) I don’t believe any of those pages are quite worth as much for PageRank as the profile pages themselves, but this info may be worthwhile in terms of your Flickr strategy, ongoing. I believe that the best strategy is to focus on good quality content and honest tagging and labeling of the photo pages themselves, though — don’t focus on PageRank so much as doing good quality content and deriving clicks over to your main site — an indirect marketing strategy, in effect.

I would expect that Flickr will probably circle around and revoke NOFOLLOW links on these remaining pages which don’t yet sport the protocol.

Also note: Flickr has rules in their terms and conditions against commercial use of their service. This is the most confounding aspect of understanding Flickr for potential marketing benefit. Flickr does not really define out what their acceptable use is, versus what isn’t. In actual practice, there are loads of people who have been using Flickr for advertising their business, and have been doing so for years. I can point to photographers, models, real estate agents, art galleries and many others who flagrantly are using the service to advertise and drive click-throughs to their main ecom sites. I’d previously interpreted that anti-commercial-use clause as intending to keep people from using Flickr as an image hosting platform, and turning around and charging others for hosting their content. However, Flickr does sometimes delete user accounts for just advertising their products. You should take this into account, in my opinion, and try to be very indirect in advertising your items. Photos which look like catalog photos, with backgrounds clipped out in Photoshop, and linked directly to online catalog sales pages may be more prone to getting penalized/deleted. More “natural-looking” photos are less likely to get dinged, and avoid adding commercially-oriented pics to Group photo album sets. I’ll likely write a commentary about Flickr’s inconsistent application of their anti-commercial clause in a future article.

Maile suggests a few ways of addressing dupe content, and she also reveals a few details of Google’s workings that are interesting, including:

• Unnecessarily long URLs are unattractive, and might reduce chances that a user would click through to your page. While this sounds like a subjective opinion that’s a bit counter-intuitive (because one could assume that users focus more on link titles than length of URLs), it’s quite possible that Google would have done enough experimentation during their usability testing to know for sure that longer URLs might actually have a negative impact on click-through rates. So, avoid longer URLs if possible in your application design!
• When deciding what to display from your site for a user’s search, if Google detects duplicate content matching the user’s query, they’ll group all the dupe pages into a cluster, and then apply some methods to choose which of your pages would be the best choice to present to their searcher.
• They attempt to focus the collective “link popularity” or PageRank from all members of a cluster on your site to one page. This is slightly odd, since it runs counter to her earlier statement that duplication can cause “link popularity” dilution. Likely, this means that there are cases when Google can find it difficult to cluster all dupes from a site, so it’s still best to reduce duplication rather than solely rely upon their algorithms to handle it for you.
• She suggests using a Sitemap to inform them of the primary URLs of a site, which suggests that Google may be using the sitemaps as a prime indicator when trying to select a canonical URL for a particular cluster. I note that while using a sitemap could help Google select which of your dupe pages to present to a user, it doesn’t really solve your entire dupe problem — you should still try to use additional methods to manage dupes.

Maile’s suggestions reiterate some of the de-duplication advice I’ve previously given, and I’ve also suggested having your site resolve to a single domain name to reduce duplication (along with Google’s Matt Cutts, who also recommends domain canonicalization).

Each of the search engines handle duplication issues a little differently, making it desirable to use best practices to manage the issue, if you really want to improve your site’s natural search performance.

A group of leading SEOs including Carsten Cumbrowski, Ahmed Bilal, and Rhea Drysdale will review one submission per week delivering a thorough review of usability and site navigation, link building, and copywriting from the perspective of placement in the four leading engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask).

It’s clear though that “free” is as free as having your site criticized in one of the SEO clinics experts like to host at conferences.  If chosen for review, the findings and recommendations will be posted for others to peruse.  I’d do as much myself and appreciate their efforts to help others with these case studies but as a website owner, someone responsible for SEO, or marketing manager for a major brand, I might not be so inclined to have my successes and failures outlined in detail for everyone to see.  That concern aside, I do hope they get some quality sites and develop a thorough library of reviews (perhaps I’ll sign up myself!).

To participate, simply contact the team here.