From an SEO stand point?

-- Google might consider the links in this article to be paid links.  If they are marked as nofollow or as sponsored then they should not have a bad SEO impact.  But if they are not marked nofollow of sponsored then they might be a problem.

-- You got an article because you want to increase brand visibility.  So, what is the DailyMail doing to deliver traffic into your article?  Are they shouting it on on their home page and on every relevant page across the site?  An article on an orphan page is worth nothing.  An article on a heavily promoted page is worth a lot more.

-- How long is the article going to be there, and how long will strong promotion of it persist?

-- It's a thin content article.   It would be best to give them a very high quality article if lots of people are going to see it.   That will produce a positive impression for your brand.  The high quality article will also rank better in the SERPs, if the Daily Mail is allowing it to be indexed.   If it is going to be used on the DM for a limited amount of time, it could then be used on another website or your own.,

-- How would I spend my next block of money and time?   I would make a kickass 10x article and post it on my own website.

When that happens here, we improve both (or all) of those pages, then go out for beers. 

We run "in house" websites.   That gives us knowledge of many other businesses in the industry.   For businesses that we don't know, we can easily check professional credentials of individuals and companies.

Google is able to check professional credentials of individuals that include:  government issued licenses, professional registrations and memberships, college degrees, wikipedia articles, awarded patents, registered copyright. and publication history in professional journals and on industry websites.

For companies, Google can aggregate the professional credentials of its staff, company certifications such is ISO (and similar), stock exchange listings, wikipedia articles, awarded patents, registered copyright.

DA is a very primitive tool in comparison.

I my opinion, DA earns zero and position on the page earns zero.

The respect of the organization represented by the website and the relevance of the linking page to the target page are more important.

In some instances, not using unique

and unique <title>is a huge opportunity loss.</p> <p>Let's say you have a fantastic article about Widgets and you break it up over several pages.  The sections of your article are:</p> <ul> <li>wooden widgets</li> <li>metal widgets</li> <li>plastic widgets</li> <li>stone widgets</li> </ul> <p>... if you make custom <h1> and <title> tags for these pages (and post them on unique URLs) you are going to get your article into a lot more SERPs and haul in a lot more traffic.</p></title>

"Would having an author page for subject matter experts who legitimately write content (courses and/or blogs) be helpful to SEO/rankings? "

Maybe yes.   Maybe no.

The answer depends upon the strength of your authors' bios and their relevance to the content area of your website.

And, here is something to think about...  If your authors are using their real names, that is likely more valuable for SEO than if they are using a nickname.   Why?  Because Google can use a person's real name to confirm professional registrations, college degrees, work history, licenses, and many other signals that will be valuable for determining E-A-T.

If a person has a website about SEO and uses his/her real name on the articles there, then it is probably a good idea for that person to use their real name when posting in an SEO forum.    IF a person is posting in Moz Q&A and receiving lots of "good answers" and "endorsed answers" that might be valuable for a person's authorship credibility on the SEO site.      If your website is not about SEO then the reputation earned in this form is probably of much lower value.

We have been running multiple sites, all for over a decade and the authors have degrees that either exactly or closely match the topic areas of the websites.  Until two years ago we considered that all articles were written by "our staff".  However, we then added author bios with degrees, certifications, years of experience, Google scholar, relevant employment history spanning decades.  Within a few months after that these sites received a rankings boost that was surprising.

Now, you ask about "the importance of bios".   Adding bios for the sake of adding bios is probably not going to do much for you.  Instead, it is the quality of the authors that is important.

If you have authors who have substantive, long-term, quality education, experience, and work history, then that, I believe will do something for you.   If your authors have a publication history on important sites, with lots of links and citations for their work from government agencies, academic publications, professional societies - all of this that you can link to, then you have built a gold mine. Very hard to fake, easy for Google to confirm, will attract links like bugs to a Georgia porch light.

It will be really hard to fake a publication  history over three or four decades with links from loc.gov and important websites across your discipline and professional registrations on government websites.

For the past year, Google is having a very hard time forgetting pages.   You can use a 301 redirect, take the files off of the server, and Google will still list the old URL -  but click to the 301 destination.

This isn't an answer to your question.  It is just an old man's way of looking at tabbed content and other things that Google treats differently today than they treated it in the past....

When search engines treat something like tabbed content poorly, and then they treat it a little better, you never know if their current treatment is the same as it would  be if tabs were not used at all.

Also, if they treated something poorly in the past, you will never know if or when they will they will start treating it poorly in the future... even if they might degrade it by degrees.

Google does some stuff for good reason, some stuff because they have a mad hat on that day, and some stuff because they think it is cool that day.   All of that can change instantly and without notice if they wear a different hat or think something else is cooler, or if a different guy is put in charge.

The above is part of the reason that Google says that they make changes to their ranking methods every day.

I used to have a couple pages in tabbed content, they performed very poorly - even after a long wait.  So, now I am not using tabbed content.     And, honestly, when I took that content out of tabs my visitors engaged it more vigorously.   Two reasons not to use tabbed content in my book.

On a lot of my pages, I have an

title at the top, often with

below it.   Below them, spanning the entire width of the page, I will have a wide format image with a relevant caption.  I think that it is important for the visitors to have an interesting image at the top.  If I don't have one spanning the entire width of the page, then I have my best image at top of the right column.  We often spend good amounts of money on these article-opening images.  We also use these images on category pages and recommended readings lists to advertise the articles to all visitors of the site.

I would not use an image as a replacement for a title line on any of my websites.

I want the

at the top in text rather than in the alt attribute of an image.

If I had a designer who insisted on this, that designer would not be working for me for another minute.  In my opinion, the

text is that important.

I believe that Google uses information about the expertise, authority and trustworthyness of a website's authors.  To make this happen, you must display it obviously.  One way is to have author pages that present information about the author such as education, work experience, publishing history and more.  Link to these from each article on the website that the author writes.

We were not doing this well, but then we spent time on it.   Shortly thereafter, a Google update occurred and our pages rose nicely in the SERPs.   Not a little increase, it was a surprising increase.

Are there sites with lesser credentials and lower quality content ranking above us.   Yes, in many places, but we are also above them in many places.  These things are not silver bullets.  There are still many factors used in the rankings - and it can take time  for Google to find and appreciate all elements of a website.

But, we spend zero time looking at our links, zero time looking at the links of our competitors, zero time looking at DA.  I can't tell you the last time I looked at DA and have no intentions of looking at it anytime soon.   I am too busy working on new content, improving old content, and trying to make the site operate better.   I am spending my energy where it makes an impact that my visitors can see and use and share and link to.

You are the igniterman.  Get busy.

Hi John,

You are placing way too much importance on DA.  Google does not use DA in its rankings.  Google most likely has never looked at the DA of the websites you are talking about.    Your post uses "DA" or "Domain Authority" in almost every sentence, sometimes two or three times.

I suggest stop looking at DA and work to make the best website possible.    Don't allow DA to be a decoy that takes you away from doing the work needed to win on the web.

So, get some coffee, and make a map of what it will take for you to have the best possible website in your niche.  Then start working on it every day.  Make sure you have the credentials needed to be taken seriously and valued by both your visitors and Google.  If you don't have them, get them.  Education is the key to writing the credible content that is needed to win on the web.

E

For a retail site, fewer things are more killer than.... "help the visitor learn about the product, decide what to buy, learn how to use the product, learn how to fix the product, and how to enjoy".

Questions received from customers by email and phone are the most important driver of the content plan.   At the same time, you must know the products well enough that you can identify the things that the customer needs to know, but is not asking.

We pay no attention to content length, other than telling enough to convey the information.  I bet we don't have a single 3000 word article on our retail sites.

I would step away from the idea of blogs and blog posts and 3k articles.

Instead decide how you can build a website designed to help the visitor learn about the product, decide what to buy, learn how to use the product, learn how to fix the product, and how to enjoy.  This requires authors who have deep product knowledge and experience, and who also understand the customer.   Targeting keywords is natural if you have the knowledge and experience to do the above.

An effective way for a small business to succeed in search is to build an ecommerce site with an extensive content library or build a large information site with a store.  This should be done without concern for which type of page gets the top ranking, and with a plan to direct content-consuming visitors to sales pages.  Most businesses do not take this route because they  fear of paying two rain-makers for each order-packer.

There is something called "link rot"... that every site experiences.  You earn some links a long time ago and most of those links will eventually disappear for reasons described by effectdigital.    If your new content production pace is not as fast as in the past, then you can be losing more links than you are earning.   Link rot hits sites that are slacking on their content production.

And, as Mr Whippy said...  "The domain linking to you is clearing out links that point to your content as they feel there is better content to link to now."    Sometimes competitors will see your content, produce something much better, then solicit the linking websites to link to their content that is now much better than yours.   We receive lots of emails suggesting better destinations for links in existing articles.   These email messages can be valuable to a webmaster, but if we look at their suggested content and it is crap, we filter their email address to trash.

You received a great reply from Alex.

We have lots of problems with content theft and go after much of it.  Our response depends on WHO has grabbed the content and republished it.  If our content is used on a dirtbag spammer site we go straight to the DMCA form that  Alex linked to.  Google responds to them, often the same day, and almost always within three or four days.  They remove the infringing content from Google search. We have done this hundreds of times.   (If you have many to file, you can use the back button of the DMCA form, edit what is different and send it in again).

If the content is on a large blogging site like WordPress or on a large forum, Google often tells us to go there and have the page taken down.  These sites usually respond promptly.

Before you go cranking out  DMCA at scale, if is a good idea to consult with a copyright attorney to learn about fair use or similar concepts in your country.  There are many ways that someone can use your content without breaking copyright law.  If you have someone taken down where fair use applies or where your claim to copyright can not be documented, they you could be on the receiving end of civil legal action.

Sometimes, more frequently than you think, we find our content on sites that should damn well know better than take our content.  These have included law firms of all sizes,  police departments, district attorneys, government regulatory agencies, government law enforcement, or simply the website of an honest and respectable company.  In these cases we don't go to DMCA.  These folks need education. So our attorney gets in touch with firm but friendly greetings.   The culprit is often someone at their office who works on the website and took some shortcuts in content development.  Also, their SEO or web developer grabbed our content, added it to the website and charged them for the content.   These cases of content theft piss you off, but watching what happens can be entertaining.

ADDED:  I forgot to address your main question.  Can content theft and republication hurt your rankings?   YES IT CAN.  Some of the sites who steal content are powerful and can outrank you.  In addition, you can lose long-tail traffic because your words on their page combine with other words on their page and outrank you in the long tail.

If a lot of websites steal the same piece of content, Google can have trouble deciding who owns it - even if you have a reasonably powerful site and the content has been on your website for a decade.  Google says that they are "good" at identifying the owner, but I don't agree.  We had important pieces of content descend into supplemental search results after a lot of other sites had stolen it.  It only emerged after we spent a lot of energy on DMCAs and direct legal notices.