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Hi Arti, Generally, you want to link to your root domain. Many common website templates link to home as /index.html, but that really hasn't been necessary for years. The easiest way to fix this would be to add a canonical tag in your homepage, which is the /index.html file. It would go in the section and look like this: After you add this, when you look at your source code for your homepage, you should see this tag in there from whatever address you reached the page from. There's a lot of information on duplicate content out there, and a lot of different ways to fix the same problem. Here's a good overview of the subject: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world Best of luck with your SEO.

It is a good point, you can 301 redirect them, but this is only valid if they have links. you can only 301 redirect requests. If they have links then it may be a good idea to leave the pages in place or reuse the same url with simular content.

Matt Williamson has some really good points in his comment.  I'm going to focus more on those potentially spammy link tactics. I would only suggest using blog comments and profiles on forums that meet the following criteria: The site is somehow related to your niche, product, service, etc. You are there to add value to an already created discussion. You are there for the long haul. The site you're participating on isn't anything shady or illegal. The biggest thing to remember is, wherever you spend time building links, you better be building value too. Any link that was created 'for the link" and not because you are genuinely adding meaningful content/conversation will be looked upon as low quality, even spammy in some cases. You don't want to create a negative image of your brand to the eyes of users, likewise for search engines.

What is a brand anchor text?

Yes, you could do multiple XML Sitemaps and then do a sitemap-index.xml referring to each of the individual sitemaps. I would also then add the URL to the XML Sitemap Index file in the robots.txt Something like: Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap-index.xml