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Open Site Explorer. It shows you everything you need to know to work out which links are good and which aren't that your competition have.

Which software? The SEOmoz tools?

Here's a video by Distilled: http://www.distilled.co.uk/conference-calls/recordings/seomoz-tools.html

Haha, what the??!! They're charging her for hosting and putting her in a sub directory of their own domain? Jeez, that is brazen. And they clearly must be one of those companies that profess to supply SEO but don't actually know squat about it. Tell her to fire their ass! And to ask for a refund on all her hosting payments. Tell her to tell them that all us crazies on this thread would like to throw wet kippers at them!

Or they could allow one, totally non-spammy sig link once you get to a certain point... i.e. 10,000 moz points or something. I doubt spammers would hang around that long to get a link

lol, well... there's about a million and one reasons that could be

But I'd hazard a guess as the main reasons being the same keyword phrase spread though-out the site including in title tags, and the whacking great ad banner at the top of every page as soon as it loads

Get rid of the ad or move it, and focus on different keywords for different pages

From my understanding, it would depend entirely on the ratio of unique to duplicate content... but it's a common problem if you mean what I think you do. Affiliate sites for example, ones that use data given to them by manufacturers or suppliers they're affiliates for. Some use the same product descriptions without adding enough of their own unique stuff to break it up and separate their pages from the other affiliates using the same content.

The more unique, the better. Personally I would try to make each set of product information as distinctive from the others as possible anyway... it can do nothing except help

If the title is relevant to the content then that's good, but from a technical sense: You shouldn't repeat any word in a title more than twice, and each instance of that word should be separated by at least one other word. Then, you have to think about what the titles are going to be on your other pages, I'd say you're more in danger of keyword canibalization within your title in that example than of keyword stuffing (assuming the rest of the site is about back pain, etc...).

Yeah it's to try to stop people buying and selling domains based on their PR. It doesn't seem to happen all of the time but an ownership change can (apparently) mean the trust that the domain got for its age gets reset, or at least reduced.

You can't have private unless you're an individual and not a company can you?

Are you sure the site is fully ready and released yet? When we used to build sites for people, we'd host them like that on our own site in a directory just so the client could see the site, etc... up until it was ready to go live, at which point it would have it's own hosting.

If not that, then yeah it's ridiculous and your friend should tell them it needs its own hosting.

Unless it's spun content

High quality and affordable don't always go hand in hand. The whole thing of "You get what you pay for" is usually the case so I'd be careful if it's too cheap. Even if the designs are awesome, maybe their customer service is bad.

Anyway, I'd get a real live person who you can meet with if I were you, instead of a random off a website that you only deal with via email. Design is way too subjective to not have face-to-face meetings in my opinion.

I know some great web designers but they're here in the UK, and not so cheap... but then if they were cheap maybe they wouldn't be so great

Some content (such as sidebars, menus, footers, etc...) will be discounted from being seen as dupe content from the block level analysis that's done by the search engines. So that stuff is fine, but if pages are too similar, without a decent amount of distinguishing content, then no that's bad. Make sure the title tags aren't the same in any case.

Yeah as long as it's relevant and decent stuff then you should definitely link out to it... I link to this site loads.

He's probably got it elsewhere too but you'll have to sign up to Market Motive to see the vid I saw it on, it's part of their SEO course.

Yeah it could just be coincidence and the drop would have happened anyway.

Yeah it was that way... not anymore though. I watched a seminar vid by Todd Malicoat who explained that they're now seen as basically the same thing.

Yeah Jane Copland works there and she used to work at SEOmoz so they must be good!

That's changed now, at least that's what was said in a seminar I watched the other day.

It would be a combination of them all.

How much traffic, how competitive, how high conversion rates are.

You need to put a value on each.

You can get an idea of conversion rates (a rough idea) from looking at the CPC... if the costs are high, it's because they convert well

It really doesn't make much difference anymore, in terms of SEO they're seen a pretty much the same either way.

*Edit: That's a fairly recent development though.