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Invite the public to submit questions and vote on them. Everyone wants a crack at asking a celeb a question...

Google Webmaster Tools and Open Site Explorer rely on different data. SEOMoz has their own index of the web which they use to create the link statistics you see in Open Site Explorer. Their index is substantially smaller than Google's, but represents a significant proportion of the overall web. What really matters is proportion, though. How many root domains do you have linking vs. your competitors? You can't get that information from Google Webmaster Tools, but you can from OSE.

You may have 1000's of links pointing to your root domain, however, if you are trying to rank a sub-page for a specific term, you may want to find unique domains that can provide direct links to the target page (anchor and generic), thereby increasing your overall linking domain count for both your domain and sub-page

See this article re merging Facebook Page and Places

And now Google has shut down the Google Directory, so it's just DMOZ. http://searchengineland.com/final-nail-in-the-google-directory-coffin-86505

Thanks guys, great insights! @Nick I do have multiple ccTLDs for the same site. The content for each, however, will be significantly different. By 'domain-mapping' I meant actually getting into the DNS records and mapping the ccTLD URL to a sub-domain Rel canonical redirect: I'm assuming that the .com.uk would be the canonical page? If this page is the canonical page, and the com/uk/ is the 'discounted' page, what happens if the rest of the site uses the .com/uk convention? (In other words, is it advisable to have this inconsistency [both from a usability, index point-of-view]?) @Gary I think this is a very interesting point. I agree with both of you that if I saw a billboard for domain.com/uk, I might think it to be slightly odd. However, I'm not sure if consistency trumps familiarity or not. Further down the rabbit-hole: I will have multiple languages (let's say en, fr, es). I want this to utilise sub-directories (I want to avoid super-fancy AJAX whatnot. I HATE Google's help page URLs, for instance). domain.com/us/en/ domain.com/us/es/ The idea here is that the site rank for multiple languages, within a country (without creating super-duper long URLs). Any ideas/tips? Maybe a quick outline might help: 1 - Main (sort of a splash/navigation page) 1 -  USA 1 - EN 2 - ES 2 - UK 1 - EN 3 - France 1 - FR 2 - EN

Agreed with the above two answers. Use an obscure url and use meta tags to noindex/nofollow the pages. I wouldn't worry too much about people finding your admin pages. You should already have security measures in place that prevent people from hacking your site or "guessing" your admin credentials. If you don't have these types of measures in place then I would recommend concentrating on these. Some ideas of things to look at: Ensure pages do not allow SQL injection attacks Use complex usernames and passwords Stop people from entering the wrong username and password more than x times within y minutes (e.g. lock out the account either permanently or for a temporary time restriction) If someone tries to enter a username and password within a given period of time, prompt them with a captcha check to ensure no bots are trying to access the site Ensure passwords are changed regularly Set up an alerting system should incorrect credentials be entered Plus there are LOADS more things you should do

It's definitely an area of concern for me, all traffic is organic, I do not apply any paid search for this client so you are right in saying that there is a definite potential to be severely impacted with algo updates - it can be dfifficult trying to convince a client who is reaping the benefits of search traffic to branch out into alternative means as a contingency.

ok tks...

Maybe you could try blocking all google.co.uk Ip's for that page.

One of the fastest ways to build authoritative links is to find popular blogs that allow guest posts (ideally related to your site's topic) and submit guest articles to them.

What is the duplicate content is in one site does this still not affect the site and its rankings?

Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered? Thanks!

Russ is right - just build it with the UX in mind. Cut only unnecessary links that you generally keep on other pages (including terms or policy pages even if those are set with no follow) - but don't strip it too much. You can build it with a Landing page structure in mind - like focusing on conversion. having a good on page overall structure with the keyword set in the right places - title, h1, great content with a good keyword density and more importantly like Russ said creating links to this particular page. And you should focus on the anchor text of those inbound - as much as possible to use the keyword but don't go overboard - it must at least look natural.