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Hi William, It mostly depends on how much volume based on traffic you're generating. If you're just hosting a simple WordPress site with on average a couple of thousand visitors you could use AWS but it's probably not really for you as the setup time will be much higher. Although if you're receiving tens of thousands of visitor everyday then it could be worth it as you can easily scale the number of servers you run. Hope this give some insights.

Hi  William If the pages in question are already indexed by Google then if you block them via the robots.txt , they will show up in search result but the meta description will say something along the lines of A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. 2) not indexed by Google for example on a new site , they don't follow it and the pages does not come up in search directly BUT if some external sites link to the pages then they can still come up in the SERP some time down the track. Your best bet to keep the page out of the public SERP index is the meta robots tag : http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html

I'm familiar with some data clustering techniques, but not in the context of SEO. Broadly speaking, cluster analysis is a way to find patterns in data where the patterns/structure are unclear. Do you have an article/quote/etc.? I'd be happy to dig deeper, but I'm just not clear on the context here.

Is it on its own domain or subdomain? You can exclude the entire thing in robots.txt, then verify the site in GWT and request exclusion of the entire dev site.

Thanks - yes, I forgot to mention that I did take those two steps, and I'm glad to know that there wasn't a whole lot more I could've done.  I

I don't know exactly how many but usually links are built to the focused URL the owner 'thought' was the primary URL, thus giving the other URL less links. I would suggest picking the link that has the most inbound links just in case you lose any rankings for losing out juice for those that are pointing to the opposite. But as you mentioned if it is about the same and it is nothing substantial you can go with your opinion.

Thanks guys. Very helpful.

Sweet! Thanks for the input.  I thought that PageRank sculpting had died, but wasn't sure if there was some lingering risk of letting your pagerank disappear through outbound links, even to high quality websites.

Thanks Chris -- yes, you nailed it.  I have seen this strategy used lots of times, but it just occurred to me today that it was probably a mistake.