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They're probably positively correlated, but I wouldn't say there is causation.  Naturally, any website ranking well for a given long-tail term is probably doing a lot of things right.  That doesn't necessarily mean that they will be competitive for a short-tail term, however.  Oftentimes, long-tail terms are of such low competition that a website can rank well for them with on-site elements in the right places and perhaps a link or two.  Short tail keywords, especially the most competitive ones, oftentimes require very extensive linkbuilding campaigns.

CopyScape will let you do it manually, but they also have a paid service called CopySentry (http://copyscape.com/copysentry.php) that will run automatically and notify you of new instances of duplicate content on a regular basis.

Google certainly recognizes that the phrases are related, but they most likely distinguish these semantically.  You'd probably want to work in phrases like "Pain Management" or "Pain Relief" to optimize for the keyword "Pain".

Moreover, though, you shouldn't really be paying attention to keyword density when you're creating your content.  In fact, you really shouldn't be thinking very much about Google at all when you're creating your content.  The very best content is written for people.  Think of your readers.  Think of what they would find most interesting/engaging/helpful.  Appeal to your readers and write like Google doesn't even exist, and you'll find that you've created the type of content that gets links on its own, and gets shared socially without having to "fake it".

A quick check of the IP addresses (http://www.seochat.com/?option=com_seotools&tool=35) shows that whoever made all of these microsites intentionally diversified the Class C addresses of these websites.  This suggests that someone with a fairly advanced knowledge of SEO is behind this little link scheme.

Microsites aren't anything groundbreaking.  These are pretty well done - the content seems unique and there has been some linkbuilding work done to the websites.  I would definitely say that these are contributing to your competitor's success.

The question then becomes...is this something you should be replicating?  That's a more complicated answer.  Microsites can be effective, especially if you give them the same level of TLC that these microsites have received.  Are they your best use of time and resources?  Not always.  The effort spent to build content and develop links for these microsites is probably better spent creating content and developing links for your main site.

The flipside of the argument is that creating engaging content and attracting backlinks in a niche industrial market can be tricky, and sometimes manual linkbuilding (like creating microsites) is just way easier.  The "white hat" response to that is that with enough creativity, pure white hat SEO success is possible.  I'd recommend reading Rand Fishkin's post, "White Hat SEO: It F-ing Works" - if you read through, he breaks down some awesome linkbuilding campaigns that have been executed in "boring" industries.  It's definitely worth the read.

I don't know about all that...

A quick site: search turned up this Game of Thrones paper.li which is indexed by Google.  The links look pretty good to me on the text-only version of their cached page.

Are all of these versions of your homepage?  They should be 301 redirected back to your main URL.

The middle example appears to be some kind of parameter string.  It's hard to say what you should do without looking at the actual website, but this could be a case where the canonical URL tag could come in handy.

A good place to start is SEOmoz's primer on duplicate content.  It walks you through all of the potential types of problems and their solutions.

Welcome to the forum, Benny.  The answer to your question is that you can probably replace these links and have the value come back, and you may regain your rankings.

I have to caution that this still may only be a temporary patch.  Link buying is a big no-no as far as Google is concerned, and their Webspam team is working every single day to find and bust websites that sell paid links.  Even if these links are still working now, there's no guarantee that will be true in the future.

The REAL ANSWER to your question is that you shouldn't renew these paid links, or any paid links.  Spend your time and money to build good, high quality links from relevant websites for free.  You'll never have to renew these links and they'll stick around forever.  Learn proper link building techniques and you'll never have to spend another dollar on a link and your rankings will be better than ever.

Sound promising?  Get started here, with SEOmoz's Professional Guide to Link Building.

I agree with Gianluca.  I think having a keyword-rich Twitter handle has extremely limited value, whereas conversely, a Twitter handle with your brand can have a ton of upside.

301 redirects are indeed the proper way to restructure URLs, and adding these shouldn't hurt you.  This is confirmed by a post by Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable a few years back.  The one thing you do want to make sure to avoid is "chaining" 301 redirects, as noted by Matt Cutts.

I don't think there is any "good" rule of thumb out there, as it really depends on your website and the amount of authority you have, but I would say that your SEO guy is certainly right in that you should try to cut back on the amount of links you have.  I don't know what your website is, but I would generally say that anywhere close to 1000 is probably too much.  Mathematically speaking, the more links you have on any given page, the more the "link juice" is going to be divided up.  For this reason, it makes sense to focus internal links on your most important pages, particularly if they are coming from one of your strongest pages, like your home page.

SEOmoz's Pro tool uses 100 links as their standard.  Any pages with more than 100 links get flagged.  In Danny Dover's book, Search Engine Optimization Secrets, I believe he cites his number as 150.

Dr. Pete wrote a tremendous post on this topic earlier this year which is certainly worth a read.

The rule of thumb I would use: Are these links good for the user?  Is this the optimal way to offer easy navigation to my visitors?  Can this be done easier, cleaner, or more efficiently?

At the end of the day, if your page is authoritative enough, something like too many links isn't going to pose a problem.  But if they're affecting user experience, or if they're weakening your SEO efforts, than they can certainly hold you back.

Why give that link juice to YouTube?  Lord knows, they've got plenty of it.

Take advantage of the links you received and make them benefit your main website.  Create a landing page on your main site featuring some of the best submissions embedded on the page, and include a link to your channel if visitors want to see even more videos.  Then, 301 redirect the microsite to the landing page on your main website in order to get the link juice to pass through to your primary domain.

The only reason you'd want to redirect your microsite directly to the YouTube channel is if you don't have a main website and your YouTube channel is your main presence online.  Even then, though, I'd generally opt in the direction of leaving the microsite up and embedding some featured videos on it.  You can certainly make a page on YouTube rank decently well for a keyword, but given the lack of control you have over on-page elements, it's much more difficult than optimizing a website that you own.

Ana -

Great question.  You certainly want to address this issue, especially in the post-Panda world we live in today.

If you have the ability to re-write your product descriptions and make the pages as unique as possible, this is the most attractive option.  Think of it as a way to re-target your product descriptions to sell to wholesalers.  The only downside to this is the potential for keyword cannabilization, although you could theoretically target different keywords for wholesalers than you do to individuals.

If you don't have the means to make that happen (read: thousands of products), you may want to look into using the rel="canonical" tag.  This will let Google know which page is the "right" page for them to be looking at.  If the majority of your web conversions from organic search are retail, then perhaps the retail pages should be the "canonical" version, or vice-versa.

Google News does not accept individual press releases, it merely aggregates news from a variety of sources around the internet.  I have had good experience with using PRWeb from my press release distribution.  In my experience, all of the press releases I have submitted with their service have ended up in Google News, and they have brought my clients a fair amount of traffic in the process.

SEOmoz's test is by far the best available, so you're already off to a good start.  You may want to look into the Google Analytics/AdWords certification tests.  I know they're not exactly related to SEO, but I'd sure want anybody doing SEO for me to know their way around Google Analytics.

There are also a few good lists of SEO interview questions that you may find helpful:

• http://www.justmeandmy.com/80-seo-job-interview-questions
• http://infolific.com/technology/internet/seo/seo-interview-questions/
• http://www.themadhat.com/search-marketing/seo-job-interview-questions/

Well, first thing's first, let's find out if your website is indeed indexed by google.  Go to Google and do a search for site:www.yourdomain.com.  Is your website coming up?  Most of your pages?  None of your pages?

Pinging can help, but if your website isn't getting indexed, you likely have some bigger issues to deal with.  Is Google being blocked by your robots.txt file?  Have you verified your website with Google Webmaster Tools and submitted an up-to-date XML sitemap?  Have you started to build high quality backlinks to your website?

If Google isn't indexing your pages, pinging them is equivalent to putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound.  First figure out what the problem actually is, then take action.

I can't be sure without digging into your site a bit, but Google has been known to use the anchor text of strong links to your website in place of your title tag, on some occasions.  This is discussed in this YOUmoz post, Distilled Stole My Page Title.

Could this be the cause?

I stumbled across Twibbon today - it's a service that basically creates an easy way for you to brand your Twitter/Facebook pictures, and to allow others to promote your cause as well.

I'm not sure if I'm late to get on board here or if this is a relatively new thing, but it seems pretty cool.  I can definitely see this really working out for promoting philanthropic causes.  It would also work really well for events - imagine if every speaker at an SEO conference used Twibbon to brand their Twitter/Facebook?  I think it would really help with branding, for both individuals and businesses.

I'm a bit iffy on how to answer this, because your question sort of seems like you are talking about PPC campaigns, but the question is posted under Technical SEO.  If you're talking about PPC, these would certainly all have their own Ad Groups.

If you're talking about SEO, on the other hand, things are a bit different.  The way people typically organize their SEO tactics is to do the whole on-site optimization stage first and foremost.  After that, specific link building campaigns would be run for a number of different high-value keywords.

As far as both duplicate content issues and dynamic parameters, you may want to look into using the rel="canonical" tag instead of the noindex tag.

• Matt Cutts: Learn About the Canonical Link Element in 5 Minutes
• Google Webmaster Central: About rel="canonical"
• Rand Fishkin: Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps

1. Add the +1 button to every page on your website.  When people +1 a page on your website, it will be more likely to come up in their personalized search results, as well as their friends personalized search results.  The user activity will also typically be published to the user's Google+ profile for their friends to see.

2. Build a Google+ page for your business and regularly update it as you would Facebook or Twitter.  Invite your users to connect with your brand on Google+ via a badge on your profile, an e-mail blast, and cross-posts to other social media accounts you actively maintain.