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You are never bleeding link equity. Link equity does not ever leave the page if you link out to others. It's more like you are sharing what you have with others. There is no SEO benefit to linking to others in terms of link equity but I believe the engines do pay attention to if you are link hoarding. Being a good member of the community is vital to growing in importance. Look and act like a leader in your space and soon people will regard you as such. Besides, backlinks to others are good ways to build relationships which can get you links later on. That is worth it alone.

These two pages are similar but definitely not duplicates. I wouldn't worry about that being the issue. The first two answers in this thread have it right, you need to build links internally and externally to these new pages to help them out. You are indexed just fine, just need some link love.

Kate

I've been thinking about this one too. And my inital reaction is that it doesn't count. Another thread at Google backs me up, http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=7778313784ba6db5&hl=en

I'd go with that it doesn't, not unless the href is present.

Happy to help Send all my best to your daughter, us Kate's must stick together

Your webmaster is right, Google will notice that they are the same. The issue with that is that crawl time is then spent on two exactly same pages. One will not show in the results, so why even have Google or any other search engine crawl it? It's a waste of their time and yours. I wanted to see the duplicate content but can't find the second page. If they are exact duplicates and the other one holds no value, 301 redirect it to the homepage and find the links to it, email webmasters to change the links. If there is a reason for it to exist, then slap on a rel canonical to the homepage.

Best of luck!