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The claim is that they're pretty good at detecting headers, sidebars and footers - and make some accommodation for these.  In my experience it's mostly related to links in those areas, though there's some duplicate content consideration. Having said that, I've also consistently seen where unless you've got a mega site with a lot of other SEO going, that accommodation is not enough to compensate for getting away with almost no actual unique content on important pages.  You still need to consider the overall competitive landscape, and you still need to have more than a spit's worth of content.  And the less you do in regard to other SEO factors, the more content you absolutely need.

Yes, there is. It's not based on old-school SEO value though as much as newer reasoning. Press releases definitely have much more churn than ever - so many sent out by so many companies every day, many of which are junk / very low quality.  So any link value you get is going to be at a much lower count than they used to generate, and many will stick around a lot less - shelf life is much shorter. At the same time however, if you opt for the wider distribution options (such as PRWeb's top two options) you're more likely to get at least some decent sites in the mix (and especially if you go with the top tier release option).  This is much more valid if the releases you create only contain one or a couple links in the content.  And don't opt to include your web site embedded in their iFrame.  It's a terrible usability issue, and offers NO value - and most definitely will not be picked up by high end news feeds. The other SEO value comes from the fact that those quality sites that do pick them up and post them do provide not just link value but mentions related to branding. Also be sure to take the time to properly categorize the release in terms of the right industry and regional reach. On a final note, they're most effective when you send them out on a regular basis - not too often, yet no less than three or four times a year. And only when you have something that's truly worthy of a legitimate press release.

I find that all the info on the Competitive Domain reporting in SEOmoz to ber completely inaccurate, i have over 300 links to my site showing in Webmaster Tools and other software but SEOmoz is only showing 12 linking root domains and this data has not updated now for several months. How are you supposed to provide regular accurate reports to your clients when this data is so outdated?  I pay my monthly fee for up-to-date accurate data and I dont appear to be getting this....not happy

Thanks. That's exactly what I have told them so I'm glad we agree

I wouldn't call it unethical unless you made a habit of it with loads of sites, all providing no value. It's never worth focusing on micro-sites, but if there's a couple there, might as well use them

Thanks for the advice.  I used a fake company for this question and bought all 3 domains for the real company. Thanks, Martin

Good advice!  Very timely considering I just asked a question about expired domains as well!

Thanks for your input, bozzie. I'd be interested to know if anyone else has an opinion on this.

Thanks to both of you. You were both awesome.  The agreement with my client was going to end in 2 months. That's why I wanted to take the short term approach. I took the owner of the company to breakfast today and had a long and honest conversation. He wants to retire and said the long term link building approach is what he wants to keep a stable retirement. He said short term would be too volatile. He is giving me 15% profit sharing + on top of my current compensation so I can be incentivized to stay & grow the company. Over 90% of the business is driven by internet. EGOL -  I am launching a WordPress blog on my site and keeping the best content for myself. This will be my long term approach. I have about 20 AWESOME articles for my blog AND an eBook that I will give away as a download. I am also going to take your advice on getting my content on highly authoritative sites. Daniel - I will be submitting the 'okay' articles to ezinearticles.com & eHow just to provide some more links.

In the past i have seen conanicals take up to 5-6 weeks. My only other advice is to monitor the amount of indexed queries you have in Google. If you know you started with 100+ and over the past three weeks it has dropped down to 50, then it is slowly taking affect (once again, using the site search). If you see the opposite and you notice no change, then perhaps the tag is still incorrect or some other issue? I can't promise that all of the queried URLs will become un-indexed but the most important thing is the base page ranks the highest when searching.

Lots of WMT data is worthless. Like previous poster, I am still seeing backlinks from a couple of years ago, as well as completely off total backlink count. You're much better of using OSE.

As for a small loss of link juice, Joe's response is one I would agree with. But in terms of keyword ranking, EGOL is spot on. There are many right and wrong things that could affect ranking in either direction. The sort of breakdown you're talking about deserves an experienced hand to get it right.