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FYI everyone, I've only just come across this video where Matt Cutts (kind of) deals with this question:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSQzUixVCzo

Just because a page is rel canonical'd to another page does not mean Google will not crawl those links.

Has anyone done any experimentation on how Google treats links that are on a page that is being "rel canonical'd" to another page?

For eg, example.com/b has a canonical pointing to example.com/a

How does Google treat the internal links that are on page example.com/b?

I'm facing a similar situation. I recently asked Tiffany Oberoi (google) at the SMX Conference in Sydney whether she suggested taking our respective TLDs and moving into a subfolder format (ie. example.com/au, example.com/nz, example.com/uk etc).

Her response? Stick with the TLDs. I don't think the geotargetting option in GWT is as reliable as it's made out to be.

Use search.twitter.com's "advanced search" options?

ie: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=&ands=lady+gaga&phrase=&ors=¬s=&tag=&lang=all&from=&to=&ref=&near=Austin%2C+Texas&within=15&units=mi&since=&until=&rpp=20 (you can change the proximity range to whatever suits your needs)

You can then subscribe to that result using the RSS feed.

Wow... tough question Geoff. Each campaign will obviously have different KPIs depending on the medium/media targeted.

I normally set the following KPIs as a base to work from:

• Increase in fan followers
• Increase in engagement %
• Increase in "spread" of messages
• Increase in conversions
• Increase in traffic to other digital assets
• Publicity value
• Increase in database subscribers

That's the baseline, but KPIs are then made a lot more specific depending on the medium of the campaign.

Hmm... all depends on your definition of "conversion". On several sites, a "conversion" is farming visitors off as quickly as possible to another site/partner; and sometimes having an ugly site, with poor grammar and a single link leads to a user leaving the site through the link out of sheer desperation... and there's your conversion.

If you're talking directly about selling as a conversion though, then that's a completely different matter. Many users won't part with their money on a site where the "service quality" is implied to be inferior... as it is when communication (a part of service) breaks down.

I asked this exact question to Greg Grothaus from Google at a conference back in 2009, and his answer was that duplicated content across different TLDs should'nt be something to be too concerned about. Realistically, search engines will decide which version of the site is more relevant for a particular geographic audience.

Hi Andres,

As long as you're getting direct followed links back to your original article, then that should be enough. A couple of other things though:

• Even though you're confident you'll be indexed before the other site, I'd still implement some embargo time on when they can publish on their site as a fallback.
• Take a look at the site itself that will be linking to you... is it something you a) want your content associated with, and b) want your link profile associated with?

Some resources you may be interested in:

[1] http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-content-technology-licensing

[2] http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-content.html (deals with syndication)

[3] http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/duplicate-content-question/