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Gah! The dreaded vestigial noindex! Our surgeons have rectified the situation. That was buried in a long-defunct component. That there's a head smacker.

I'm sure you're well versed in how Page Rank works, but some times it's good to have someone else explain it with a metaphor. And what comes to mind is Ian's old post on this here: http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2010/09/pagerank-without-math.htm Following his line of thought on the subject, I'd say yes overall restricting the amount of links in the menu will be beneficial. Some of your sub-sub pages may lose some PR value, but it will also likely increase the PR value of your main pages, and give you a good chance of ranking higher for more competitive keyword terms.

Just because a page is shown as a sitelink under the main listing on the SERPs doesn't mean it can't also appear as a seperate result. A site I look after has the number one ranking for its main keyphrase, has site links and also one of the site links pages is displayed in second place. If the page is not ranking for the desired keyphrase currently then removing it from showing as a sitelink will not mean it will automatically appear as a result in the listing. If this was the case then the strategy for any site with sitelinks would be to minimise the number of sitelinks to maximise the number of other pagespushed into the top 10.

I'd go for the 301 since you truly are targeting American customers. Be prepared for a couple month period of bad results while the 301 takes effect.

Many large retailers will have ecommerce sites with products and pages of content in completely unrelated niches so your extra pages of loosely related should be fine. They may not rank highly for the terms related to the main theme though.

This will not be problem from the penalty point of view - the question is if the page value. What is new or unique about the page that is also about the same topic? On another note observe that Google monitors and warns about duplicate TITLE and META description tags in Google Webmaster Tools. H tag duplicates are not included. That would have to indicate that H tag is not as important to them.

This is a perfect opportunity to use the canonical tag: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394 so that only one of these pages is indexed.

I've suggested using robots.txt in the other question you've posted and I think the same applies here. Do any non-duplicate pages appear in the /embed/ or /email/ directories?

There are many problems that makes a dublicate page: 1. www resolve (domain with www and domain without www, search engines see tem as 2 websites and consideres dublicate content) 2. Parameters used in sending them with get method between pages ex : "?pageId=12&userid=566" here you will use canonical links or exclude them from webmastertools or use robots to block the access to these pages 3. When you use filters or search querys, combobox, dropdown menu, theese components are using get method if there is not specified in form one. 4. I sow your site and you have there many Telerik.Web.UI.RadComboBox -> here is your problem see how you manage their parameters and how the forms are validated and how page is loaded canonical tag may be your sollution generally :)

Well, external links to pages are 80% of the ranking factor for the page. That has nothing to do with your internal nav link structure. But, yes, internal juice will flow 1/750th to each page that the nav structure points to.

I had problems getting redirects for URLs with spaces in them working correctly on my own site, and ended up using the Redirection plugin as well, and it's worked like a charm. The other thing I like about this plugin is the ability to see 404 errors and to set up redirects straight from that 404 list. If someone has linked to you and accidentally did a typo in the URL somewhere, or a comma got included in the hyperlink, you can see it in the 404 list and fix it right there.

Thanks to everyone who responded with very helpful suggestions and ideas regarding doing both national and local optimization. - Tom

Yes! It is possible for different pages in the same non-country specific TLD to rank in different countries without running into duplicate content issues, even when the text is largely the same. You'll need to indicate to Google, bing, and other search engines that the page is meant for a specific geo-targeted audience. Here's how. From Ian McAnerin, brilliant international marketer, comes this elegant solution: Create the folder: www.mywebsite.com/uk Inside, create pages labeled: www.mywebsite.com/uk/name-of-your-page-uk. Do this for all the pages you want to have rank in the UK. Remember - you need only one or a few landing pages for the UK and then send the UK readers into your site as needed. The UK landing pages all need to have the following - uk in the url local UK address and phone number written in British English (use the appropriate spellings, grammar, and choice of words. Ie: the UK has 'lifts'' the US has elevators Build at least ONE localized link to the page. Ie: for a UK landing page, get at least one link from a UK based website into that page. You can buy a UK site for this purpose (www.mywebsiteuk.co.uk is probably available) Learn more about Ian's brilliant international ranking solution here: http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/301-redirect-geolocation.asp

I'm assuming the keywords in these domains are generic in nature? There are two ways to go - 1) Build other sites on the domains and leverage them in some manner.  This can become a huge task to manage - instead of promoting one site, now you have a whole group of them to deal with. If that's your plan, IMO this is a risky time to make a big investment - at least, not until we see how Google is going to implement the keyword domain changes iNET referenced. If the domains get direct navigation ("type in") traffic, they could be redirected to your primary domain.  In that case, search becomes a moot point.  But buyer beware - only the top quality domains get this kind of traffic in any volume -make sure the seller has reports to back up any claims and beware of traffic-boosting scams.

Okay take this with a pinch of salt because this is quite old information and things do change quickly in this business. Yahoo used to value pages over domains, so if you had the 'best' page on a subject that is what would count, the information on the domain itself was largely irrelevant, and this may still be the case. Google has a more holistic approach, considering the domain as a whole. This may be what is causing the difference. As Andy says they all have their own algorithms and ways of judging a site, and this is just a symptom of that. It's not really a reason to worry though Google is still the largest player (certainly in the West and especially the EU) and exposure on there will likely help push your rankings on the other search engines up as well over time. Lets face it, if you're doing well in Google you're ahead of the game, you've done well. For the time being just keep doing what you're doing.