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I usually try to make the first image on the page highly relevant to the primary keyword and use that keyword in the alt. However, if the image was not well described by that keyword I would use something more appropriate.
It might help you with longtail and image search... but I doubt it will hurt much for the primary query... why not get a second image that matches the primary query?
We are telling you that we think you will make a lot more money with more knowledge.
We can't teach you the full scope of SEO in a forum. And we don't want to give specific advice on a site when we are guessing.
So, you can improve your knowledge or get assistance and probably make a lot more money. Or you can be satisfied with making less money.
I hope that this isn't a client site.
Check out Samuel Scott's recent YouMoz post... and be sure to watch the Copyblogger video. Samuel's post and the copyblogger video are a fantastic pair. (I am really surprised that the post has only gotten a few thumbs up so far.... but like most things that require very hard work and talent, people either "don't get it" or "ain't got it"... and a gem goes unappreciated.)
http://moz.com/ugc/how-to-approach-owned-and-earned-media
(To fully understand the Copyblogger video you got to know about "The Guiding Light"... "Marvel Comics"... and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" and how content creation, content ownership, content revenue generation and retail products can form a constellation - wikipedia articles are recommended but you only need to pay attention to who owned the content and how movies, TV programs and comic books were used as enormous advertisements.)
If we went with the second, we'd create blog posts for each of the articles announcing their addition.
This is what we do. We have a blog that gets six to ten shout-outs of news every day - mostly pointing to other websites in our industry or on news sites that have a relevant article (this content is not evergreen). Our own content (which is evergreen) is place on an article page and a blog annoucement is used to get the word out - because we have a nice list of people who subscribe to the blog feed using Feedburner RSS or email.
We also have a retail site with a blog. It gets lots of "how to" articles that might have 1000 works and a few images. Although these are published through a wordpress blog the posts are organized by interest level on category pages on our website - not in blog category format (which is by date).
They are doing you a favor. They are telling you that you will have better results with different content.
There is a lot of content on SEOmoz about linkbuilding.
There isn't a lot of content on how to create successful content and how to recognize it.
So the next time you have some content that you want to get in front of bloggers, why not come here and ask... "What do you guys think of this content?"
You will get honest feedback.
If its really good content some folks here might blog, tweet or link.
If you have really good content you don't have to show it to very many people because a few eyes on great content is like throwing gasoline on a fire.
Would the lack of proper redirects be the sole reason for the drop?
Many things could cause a traffic drop. It sounds like your site is a candidate for lots of problems.
I would hire a pro to review the site since the site has these obvious problems - my bet is that there are other problems and things that could be improved.
I think it would be money well spent.
If I was creating a genuine "buyers guide" for an entire category of products, that should be something substantive, requiring a lot of work, and as such would be a valuable stand-alone addition to a website. So, I would give that type of content a special page on my website, feature it prominently, and not make it a caboose on a category page.
This isn't the answer that you were looking for.... but if I purchased your company I would probably combine all of those blogs into a single kickass site.
You then would have an awesome powerful blog that will probably outperform your entire collection of blogs.
......................................................
Now to your question..
You can use the same article twice and use a cross domain canonical.
See these articles....
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1716747
http://searchengineland.com/google-supports-cross-domain-canonical-tag-32044
You made a low-effort attempt to get them removed.
Don't go to war over this.
If your site gets whacked... then go to war.
So... did the forum traffic drop... or did the website traffic drop.... and if the website traffic dropped was it traffic from the forum that disappeared.
You have access to the analytics. Study your analytics to see what traffic dropped (referrer and landing pages), what did not drop (referrer and landing pages), and if engagement (average number of views per visitor) changed.
We can only guess from here.
Note that I used the word "study" instead of "look at". Spend some time with the analytics until you understand the changes in traffic patterns. You will not have a good answer to your question without this information.
Tell us the story.
Just reporting observations.....
I add a new article a few times per month on a domain that is strong and long-established.
The articles that I write usually target keywords that can be moderately to quite difficult. The articles are usually substantive with about 1000 to 3000 words and several images. In my opinion they are some of the better content on the web for their topics.
When these articles are launched they often rank ten to twenty pages deep in the SERPs. They stay there for months. I do nothing to promote them other than add them to category pages on my site, list them for a short time on the homepage and news page. After a few months the ones that target easy keywords might be in the first page of google. The ones that target moderate to difficult terms slowly climb the SERPs and may take a year, sometimes two years to reach the first page.
This is how I have published for years. Things have worked this way for years. I believe that google promotes these pages based upon how visitors respond to them. Slowly google figures out that visitors engage these pages and slowly promotes them up the SERPs. I zero time promoting them beyond my website. I would rather spend that time on the next article.
I update articles a lot.
I believe that there is more upside than risk in doing it.
Some of my articles have been updated many times over several years. Each update adds more content, sometimes more images.
Many of these articles rank well in competitive SERPs.
I am really interested in hearing what others have to say about this.
I know that .pdfs can be very valuable content. They can be optimized, they rank in the SERPs, they accumulate PR and they can pass linkvalue. So, to me it would be a mistake to block them from the index...
However, I see your point about dupe content... they could also be thin content. Will panda whack you for thin and dupes in your PDFs?
How can canonical be used... what about author?
Anybody know anything about this?
One of my competitors made this type of error and we figured it out right away when their site dropped from the SERPs. It took them a couple weeks to figure it out and make the change. We were hoping that they never figured it out so we could rake in lots of dough. When they fixed it they were back in the SERPs at full strength within a couple of days.... . but they had 40 indexed pages instead of 4,000,000.
I think you will recover well, but might take a while if you don't have a lot of deep links.
Good luck.
I don't think that you will get anything but guesses to your questions because a variety of things could be causing this problem. I certainly would not take action on any advice given with multiple potential causes.
If this was my business, I would hire someone who understands the various Google algos that can change the rankings of websites, have them assess both sites, and then give you advice on what might be the cause and what might be the cure.
If you have a website about hydraulic jacks, ask someone who knows about them.
If you have a site about knitting, ask someone who knits.
Otherwise the reviewer will tell you.... "Uh huh... looks good."
from say # 30 to 38
This could be normal flux. Hang in there.
One thing we are having trouble with is our meta description and meta keywords for each page.
Meta keywords is meaningless.
If you have concerns about your site maybe a consult with a Drupal Expert would put your mind at ease and correct any real problems.
Ok the reason i wrote this is because I'm getting mixed messages and still as above , people contradict each other.
You can decide "what" you want to believe or "who" you want to believe.... or a combination of the two.
Offers of ... "quick".... "easy".... "cheap".... Are going to be the wrong offer 99% of the time.
just "produce great content" and sit on our asses.
That's what I do.
'Cept, I don't do much ass sittin'. I am right back onto the next piece of content.
If you don't spend any time link buildin' you can make twice as much content and then even if it attracts half as many natural links you have broken even on the links because you have double the amount of content.
The problem with link buildin' is that you can only put 20 hours per week into it. With content makin' at the end of the first year I have 100 articles out there pullin' links and at the end of the fifth year I have 500 articles out there pullin' links, but you are still only able to work 20 hours per week. Rand would say that content makin' is a flywheel activity because it scales while link buildin' isn't.
The biggest risk that you take content makin' is that you are not honest with yourself, or unable to distinguish, "great content" that will become popular from "pedestrian content" that nobody will link to and most people bounce off of.
I like both of the suggestions given by Online Marketing Guy and Anita Clark. Both are great ideas.
Online Marketing Guy's idea is fast and low cost. Anita's is high quality and an investment.
Before deciding I would look at the traffic coming into these articles. Are they getting traffic, are they earning links, is the traffic valuable. If the answer is "NO" then maybe a greater investment in content is not going to pay.
Now.... if this site belonged to me and I wanted to produce "news for an industry niche"... I sure would not build a second website. I would add that news to a blog on my primary site.
Divide and conquer has been a battle plan since the beginning of history. You are doing this for your enemy. Instead, unite the clans.
There is a difference between links and linkjuice.
Links themselves are worthless, it is the linkjuice that does something for you.
Let's say that you make 30 blogs and toss them up to the server. Each blog has a few links to your website.
What will you get from that? NOTHING
Why? Because before your blogs can pass any linkjuice to your primary site those blogs must have linkjuice flowing into them from outside of your network. Until you have that your blogs will not be indexed and because they are not indexed they will have nothing to pass on to your primary website.
For your scheme to work you need a source of linkjuice from outside of your own network of websites.
If you can come up with that linkjuice it would be a lot smarter to simply connect it directly to your primary website instead of filtering it through a bunch of orphan blogs.
Lots of people think that they can manufacture links. Yes, you can manufacture links but there is only one place to get linkjuice - and that source is outside of your own network of websites.
**We're thinking of consolidating the smaller sites into our most successful site (www.product1.com) in order to save management time and money, even though I hate to lose the product-specific URLs in search results. Is this a wise move? **
As a general answer, I would say that it is a wise move. I my opinion, in most instances the only time that you should have two sites competing with one another is when you have one site that is a total dominant in its business niche and you have the time to build unique content on a second site. Even then, it might be more profitable to spend that same effort adding additional products on your main site or launching a new site in a new niche. Keep in mind that is a general answer and detailed study should be done to determine if closing some of your sites is a smart move.
If we proceed, all of the products will be available on both our company site and our most successful site (www.company.com & www.product1.com). This would unfortunately give us two sites of duplicate content, since the products will have the same pictures, descriptions, etc. The only difference would be the URL. Would we face penalties from Google, even though it would make sense to continue to carry our products on our company site?
If this was my company, I would be investigating the closing of four sites and doing 301 redirects to the one that remains (assuming that detailed study supports that and all of the sites are in superb health with great link profiles).
But you ask about duplicate content. If you have that, then one site could be dropped from the SERPs. If the two sites have links that connect them it is a very high probability that google will kill one. Google started being able to detect that and kill one of the sites about ten years ago.
Disclaimer: What I wrote here is generalized opinion. Detailed information could change my mind... and I don't have time to do that type of evaluation even if the data was presented here. Very time consuming. If these were my sites I would make up my mind about this type of move over a period of months and not in a few moments.
I have lots of images on my websites that are popular in Google image search. These images are often grabbed by "image directory" sites. The goal of many of these image directory sites is to display your image, or simply link to it, and hope that it gets picked up by image search, which will then result in their site getting attribution for the image and traffic referrals from image search.
We don't allow other sites to use our images, have them marked clearly with copyright, and have cautions about unauthorized use on our own website. So, if our image on their website appears in Google image search, we submit a DMCA complaint to google and a copyright violation complaint to adsense. This usually gets the image kicked out of image search and the adsense ads turned off on the offending page.
We submit DMCAs weekly or even daily if there are a lot of active infringers. Caution.... don't submit DMCAs or complain to adsense unless you are certain that they are not making a fair use of your image.
My retail site has a blog on the same domain.
I write how to use products, how to select them, how to maintain them. Those pages link to the relevant product pages and the product pages link to relevant blog pages.
The blog pulls traffic from the SERPs and some of that traffic goes to the product page and buys something.
I value the blog posts based upon the number of conversions that they produce. When I see something that works I make similar posts.
If you simply move a site from Server A to Server B or from Hosting Company A to Hosting Company B there should be no change in your rankings.
Sometimes slowness is not the fault of the server or the host. There are lots of things that you can do to speed up your site. These include: optimizing images, removing code bloat, caching pages on the server, reducing the number of files called per page, and much more.
We cut average load time by nearly two seconds per page by doing the above.
If you are calling in widgets, images or data from other domains they can really add to your load time.
I would kill the weaker site, redirect it to the stronger, and attack with all my energy and effort going into a single site.
Your current situation sounds like one guy trying to drive two cars at same time.
I think that too much thought is often put into these situations. If the charity is a good one with an agreeable mission and money is available then support them. Head-to-toe SEO evaluation and pedigree sniffing transforms a donation into a conditional decision and a that makes the link purely manipulative. If these types of analyses move upstream then charities will start doing tricks to manipulate DA so that they are more attractive to donors who are trying to game Google.
Looking for the win-win situation..... we can be 100% confident that Google is not probing the DA of websites and using that information to calibrate the power of outlinks on charity sites. So, the course of action that is best for all is to donate the money and spend the research and decision-making time preparing to write a new article for your website. That gives you two good deeds.
I've seen this "1 link per 125 words" for blog posts suggestion pop up a variety of places. I wanted to know if that's "correct" or a best practice?
Where are you reading this stuff? I wouldn't read that author any more.
In my posts, I generally write between 800 to 1200 words with about 4 to 6 links in the body of the post.
Wow... that sounds like a great way to get a Penguin attack.
However, (and this may be a problem) I add about 13 links in my closing paragraph, "if you have any legal questions, etc etc, click here for your "Tampa personal injury attorney, Clearwater Personal Injury Attorney, etc etc for all the areas we practice in related to that blog post."
I would stop doing this right away.
If you get one client for a dentist that client might spend an awful lot of money. I just paid nearly $1000 to get one tooth repaired. They want nearly $100 for a six month check! So, if you can get that dentist one patient per month that dentist should have positive ROI.
Your work gets a car sold... geez... they want $350 to do the $30,000 mile check! If you get one car customer per month they should have positive ROI.
Now, at the end of 36 months that dentist should have sustained revenue of 72 cleanings a year and at least 18 minor repairs - unless he has bad breath that scaress away the patients. The result of your work on a monthly basis would be ((722200)+(18*200))/12 .... $2700 per month
So, if you are charging a few hundred a month then that might be a good return (for the dentist)... but if you are looking for $2000/month clients then you are fishin the wrong pond.
Tag pages can be valuable if they are unique and substantive.
If your tag pages are all short like these then I would 301 them. You also might be able to disable them in your content management system.
I don't use tag pages. Instead my blog has a homepage, post pages and hand-built category pages that are outside of the content management system.
When I see Google calling things spam, I steer way around them.
Other people have business models that flirt with the limits for another increment of competitiveness.
So, your idea of "pretty natural" goes up against something that Google sees as manipulation of their product and exploitation of their searchers. They can nuke websites with the touch of a button or by the passage of a robot.
I have not used press releases for fifteen years.
Bob,
I don't think that mimicking your competitors is a good strategy for winning. Instead you should be doing something that is superior. Keep that in mind.
The value of images on a webpage varies depending upon the subject. If I am talking about how to install crown molding then images of how it is done are extremely valuable to my article. They might even be more important than text. So, if these guys are writing about topics for which images can play a critical role then they should have their heads examined if they are not using lots of images.
Lots of other topics might not lend themselves to an article with a lot of images. However, images can be used for other things. They can be used to reinforce points, pretty up a page (which is important in my opinion - landing on an article with no images is horrible for engagement in my opinon).
We take a lot of our own photos, we license a lot of photos, and we use websites like istockphoto to obtain access to a library of photos that can be licensed for minimal cost.
So, I would use photos and art and tables and graphs no matter what I am writing about. I think that it makes for a classy website and those photos can be used as primary, secondary or "did you know?" content.
In short, I pay very little attention to my competitors, other than to take a quick look at their content and decide if I can beat it. For me images are a major way for me to beat my competitors in richness of content and aesthetic appeal
Oh... doesn't that make you mad?
The same thing happened to me.
We held #1 position for a trophy term and had a video on that page. Then when google decided to display the video as a universal search result, our #1 listing disappeared.
We lost a lot of traffic because the video appeared near position #6 in the SERPs. We moved the video to a different page of the website. Several weeks later our video result disappeared and we went back to #1.
I am willing to bet good money that breaking up this site will result in an enormous traffic loss.
Why? You are going to take a large authoritative domain that is probably a nice brand and break it up into a bunch of hotdog stands.
Google likes big brands. Google likes authority. Visitors like to be impressed. I would not do this.
they get interested in the topic at first, up to the point of asking us to send them a Guest Post article and then.. silence, no response from them.
Lots of people sent me content to consider and don't hear back or I send them an honest response that they don't like. Why? I don't want their content on my website. It could be poorly written, well written but with no meat, well written but in a style that I don't like, well written but on a topic that does not fit into my website, loaded with links, linking to sites that I want nothing to do with, they send hardcore chest-thumping promotion. In most instances, I provide guidance for the writer. They ignore it.
So I give these suggestions....
A) Ask for guidance. Don't dare send anything that goes against it. They will reject the content and reject you for wasting their time.
B) Make sure that the content that you send is excellent. Better quality than what they already have on their website.
C) Make sure that the content matches the tone and style of their website with titles, headlines, subheads, paragraph length, reading level, photos, captions in the same style as their website. Make it easy to "drop into the site".
D) Send two or three pieces of content that are very different and allow them to pick.
Good luck.
...passing page rank from you to their client, something they are clearly doing for their own personal gain....
Right. I agree. And some of this crap is coming from people who call themselves "PR Services". In my opinion the PR services have been infiltrated by a lot of spammers who wear suits to work.
I agree with Phil.... the number of years means nothing.
You want somebody SMART.... and who knows the language of the business. This is especially true if you are in a technical niche such as specialty chemistry or physics where search volumes are near zero and tools are near useless - but transactions can be $xx,xxx or more.
Sometimes the receptionist who answers the phone can teach an SEO a lot about keywords. That person takes all of the phone calls where people ask.... "duh.... do you sell those bugtussle nimrods?"
If this was my site, I would stop linking to tag pages and search results pages. I would also block them from being indexed.
It is very possible that the search results pages are causing issues. Google said back in 2007...
"Typically, web search results don’t add value to users, and since our
core goal is to provide the best search results possible, we generally
exclude search results from our web search index. "
Matt Cutts comments about it here and on a similar subject here.
This is a very important question and you don't want to steer this decision using "shoot from the hip" answers or kibitzing.
I believe that a good answer to this question would require a person to become very very familiar with these 5000 blog posts, the links that flow into them, the amounts of traffic that they receive, their content quality and their search engine health.
If suddenly some 99% of a 5,000 page blog is changed to have the blog pages no-indexed, will the linkjuice be now more concentrated on the remaining 1%?
This is an extremely drastic move. There might be better ways to accomplish your goal of using the power of these pages to drive linkjuice. However, linkjuice is not the single factor here. Traffic, navigation structure, keyword reach of the site and many other things could be more important.
I don't want to give any specific advice because a well considered answer is what you need and I am unable to provide it. I don't think that anyone can given the information provided and without being extremely familiar with your website.
When I have made this type of decision with my own site (that I know extremely well from working on it every day for many years) I usually study on it for weeks, looking at traffic, conversions, content investment and more, then obtained second opinions to give me strength or weakness about making the move.
This is not a decision that is easy to make. Quick answers given here are going to come with risks.
Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it. 
I have encountered a few guest bloggers that I really respect. I occasionally receive offers of free articles from people who simply have a story to tell and they know that my website gets a lot of traffic related to their story's topic. These people are generally content area experts who produce wonderful work and they often have great photos or graphics to accompany the article. And they are not asking for links, trying to shill a business, or even seeking payment.
I have several of these articles on my site and have felt so good about them that I have given the author payment for hundreds of dollars simply to create a transaction that I have paid them for the right of publication. Once I started paying, a few of them have written several articles - on topics that I don't have the expertise to write about. I have gotten some of my best content from a couple of these people.
I see lots of what appear to be "opinions" as answers here.
Does anyone have a link to an article with data that clearly ties keyword links in articles that connect to pages on the same site being a genuine problem that has been penalized? A video or blog post where a Googler such as Matt Cutts is quoted would also be great proof.
If this was a problem then sites like Wikipedia would be in big trouble.
Do you see this domain as possibly being hit by the EMD?
All of the domains that are important to my business are EMDs. I know other people who use EMDs as important parts of their businesses. In my opinion, Google does not discriminate against these domains. In fact, I believe that Google still favors these domains. So, if you have an EMD with ranking issues it is likely caused by other factors such as Panda, Penguin, competitors, technical issues, low-quality SEO, among others.
And, if I was going to start another business, the first thing that I would to is go straight to the person who owns the appropriate EMD and try to get it from them - and be willing to pay good money.
Your organization will have at least one person who has lots of contact with lots of donors. Perhaps that person would be willing to approach them about a link. Lots of donors (though not all lf them) enjoy spreading the word about how they contributed to worthy causes (think about those photos of oversized checks in the newspaper). These folks might be willing to write an announcement (long articles not needed) about their recent gift(s) and include links to your organization. (You could offer to prepare it for them). They might also use that announcement as a press release to local newspapers, local other groups who like to publicize good works.
Also, some businesses are plagued by telephone and email solicitations from charities. We used to get several per month. They were time wasters because we can't spend time screening charities that we have never heard of. Then we placed an obvious link in the footer of our website about our charitable giving. That link goes straight to an article that says... lots of people contact us about contributions... we want to let you know that our company gives 100% of charitable giving to [name of charity]. After that link and article went live, the number of calls dropped by at least 80%, and the ones that don't notice that link and call are handled gracefully..."[thanks for calling, 100% of our support goes to [name of charity]." Charitable solicitation calls are no longer a problem because we don't get very many and the ones that we do get are easy to deal with. And, our favorite charity got a great article with an obvious link.
This is a difficult question to answer.
The answer depends upon 1) how much knowledge you have, 2) what type of subject you are writing about, 3) how picky your client is, and, 4) if you are writing just to get keywords on a page or if you are writing to attract links and earn high rankings.
There are many different types of topics. Here are just a few....
A) thoughts and opinions (should the USA sell natural gas to Ukraine?)... You have to know a lot about many subjects to write that type of content, and then you must analyze it and explain it. It is really easy to be wrong and look like an idiot. It is really hard to write this without doing a lot of research and knowing what and where to research requires experience.
B) simple reporting (like news reports)... This usually isn't difficult writing as long as you have all of the facts
C) technical and factual (like explaining atomic absorption flame spectrophotometry). If you try to write this without a very good knowledge of chemistry and physics and familiarity with the language of those disciplines you will sound like a complete idiot starting in the first sentence. Any knowledgeable reader will know that you are not prepared to write that content.
I spend most of my time writing content in areas like A and C above. I am not writing just to get keywords onto a page. I am writing to produce pages that are best-on-the-web for their topic area.
I earned several college degrees in my subject area and have about 30 years of experience working and teaching in the subject area. With all of that background I still have to do a lot of research before writing. Sometimes accurate information is very hard to find and then explaining it clearly is still difficult. Knowing what people want to know is easy but knowing what they really need to know requires experience. Being able to speak like an educated person about these subjects requires immersion in an industry or academic community.
Now, I want to spend my time writing about a topic that is very close to my education and work experience. But, because I want to write competitive content, some of the best that is on the web for the subject areas, I am going back to school for a few years to learn more, to become conversant in the language of a new subject, and to understand what people need to know instead of just what they want to know. That is the valuable information.
All of this is not needed if you are writing about common events that do not require great background knowledge and communication to expert or technical audiences. There are a lot of websites that don't need such background. But there are many who must have it.
Don't try to bullshit the readers. The important readers will smell it immediately.
If you feel that you are not qualified to write the content for certain clients, I would not hesitate to decline the work and instead spend time writing for clients where your knowledge and background are strong - you will be more productive there and produce a better product.
I noticed the robots.txt file returned a 404 and asked the developers to take a look and they said the content of it is fine.
Sometimes developers say this stuff. If you are getting a 404, demonstrate it to them.
You should write in natural language. That might produce a very different keyword density - especially if the article is really long. Google can tell when you are stuffing in the keywords. Readers think that you don't know how to write.
This is just my personal opinion. Others might disagree.....
I took a quick look at your site and saw content with titles such as...
"The Top Ten Reasons to Go Mobile with Brickweb"
"Need an Upgrade? – The Top 5 Reasons to Work with Brickweb"
OPINION #1: Don't shill or chest-thump
In my opinion these are not articles and are not very linkable. Why? They are marketing pieces in which you promote your own services. I link to eight to ten pages on other websites several days per week and have been doing this for about ten years and paying attention to what my visitors click and write to me about. Based upon that experience I don't link to marketing messages. I link to information. I link to content that teaches basic concepts.
If I linked and sent my visitors to pages that are full of chest-thumping and people shilling their own products I would lose my readers. Honest.
OPINION #2: Share Expertise
If you want to earn links then blog about topics that help people understand the basics of how a responsive website works. Do you make separate pages? Do you use CSS? Do you have a program that reformats? Explain the choices and how they work. Don't promote yourself. Just explain it.
OPINION #3: LOOK AT THE MOZ BLOG
The Moz blog is a pretty good model. Take a look at how the authors have filled it full of diagrams, photos, images, data tables, screenshots. That makes the content 10X more interesting than a page full of text. A well illustrated article is kickass for attracting links.
OPINION #4: YIANNIS IS RIGHT!
Yiannis says... "1) Your content is not optimised for searches thus it is not ranking for anything"... I agree. What keywords are the two posts that I copy/pasted in bold above targeting? They are not going to rank for anything that anybody in your biz niche is searching for. "Go mobile?".... "Top Ten Reasons" .... "Need an Upgrade". They are not going to rank for any of those and the traffic there is not relevant.
I would avoid any JoeSchmoe.com's sitebuilder program. They often become orphans when Joe moves on to other projects.
I would favor something like wordpress that is used by millions of people, installs on your domain and there are many many smart SEOs who can tweak it for top performance.
If you are not into servicing your own databases, templates, etc. there are plenty of people out there who will do that for you on an hourly or contract basis. The important thing is to get someone who knows what they are doing from an SEO perspective.
Don't second-guess on that myth that scrapers can't hurt you. These guys are outranking you right now with your own content. Proof enough to me that Kissmetrics needs to take notice and pull down false information. Also, this is another clear example of Google not knowing how poorly their systsem is working and they know not that they know not.
Google would not be getting millions of DMCAs per week if they were right about this. I've sent them hundreds.