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....trying to rank for some very competitive local terms...  rank better without building out an entire site.

You have a "fighter wannabe" who is skinny, untrained, smokes, weak,.... and he wants to fight the heavyweight champ.

You can give him pep talks and send him into the fight or you can delay the fight and get him ready.

For this client I would explain that fighting on the web is a battle of resources.  He ain't got much right now, so don't expect much.

But, you can point out some ways to get some resources and suggest what those resources might be.  This company is building lots of attractive homes.  Each of them can be a marketing message for the community where it is located and a marketing message for the style of home.  Both of those are optimization keywords.

Getting a photographer to visit the homes, take lots of photos then someone at the company who knows about the homes can dictate some information about each photo.  Get that together in an optimized page for "Custom Home in East Arlington - Split Level".

These pages serve many purposes.  They can be used to market the home.  They can be used to showcase great work and demonstrate the range of homes that this company builds.  They can be used to showcase a presence in many neighborhoods.  They will collect traffic for their keywords.  People will pin them on Pintrest,  People will share them on Facebook... We like this!... We bought this!.. Yay!... This is beautiful!   Subcontractors might refer to them, real estate agents might refer to them.  Any builder who does not want that is nuts.... dumb even.

Tell this client.  YOU NEED TO DO THIS!   If this small investment sells ONE HOME you got your money back many times over.

I put more effort into sellin' stuff for $5 than they are spending trying to sell $500,000 homes.  Duh?

Mine is missing too.   Must have been pretty recently taken down or people at my office would have noticed.

If you link to a pdf, some of your power flows into it.   If someone else links to a pdf, some of his power flows into it.

PDFs accumulate backlinks, accumulate pagerank.  You should assign these valuable assets to real pages.

So, if you have pdfs that are duplicates of webpages then you should use rel=canonical using htaccess to attribute them to their matched webpage.  If you don't do that then you assets are being squandered.

Marie Haynes.

Check out all of these link penalty articles on SearchEngineWatch.  http://searchenginewatch.com/author/2779/marie-haynes

Another list of link penalty articles published here on Moz.    http://moz.com/community/users/308135

Her site and book are here.  http://www.hiswebmarketing.com/unnatural-links-recovery/

Those are just some of what she has published.

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.

In this case, it is not about the "website".   In this case it is all about the business.

*  They arrived at the fight (on the web) 13 years ahead of you and have been in business since 1975.

*  They are a more mature business with strong industry recognition and lots of mentions.

*  They have well-known leadership with lots of mentions.

*  Visit their "about us" page and compare.

If this company ever figures out how to run a good website you are really in trouble... better beat them now while they are in low form.

If you want to improve your site... get rid of all of these tag pages... they all have identical content.... they are sucking your power and could be getting you in trouble with panda.  Take a look at the three URLS below and compare them.  Should tell you why google hates these pages and maybe your website.   You have LOTS of these pages.

http://www.kbamerican.com/tag/judgment-execution/

http://www.kbamerican.com/tag/judgement-enforcement-agency/

http://www.kbamerican.com/tag/judgement-recovery/

First, you should give thanks that you got something. 

You told the CEO and his accomplished wife that this was important content and they decided to delegate.  That's their decision, not yours.  They must trust this person to do a good enough job that they can post her work on the website and not be ashamed of it.  If they have a great reputation in the industry they will be picky about what represents them on their website.  She could be the next big author in this field.  So, I think that you should read what she wrote and be happy with it and the only reason that you should make a fuss is if there are obvious problems with the article that you can recognize as a third party.

Second, you got the CEO to be a talkin' head in a couple of videos that will be posted on this page.  So, slap that video above the fold, show the CEOs face in the video window annotated with his name and you got the next best thing to him writing the article.  You can also make a separate page that includes these two videos and their transcripts and they might bring in traffic.

Getting it wrapped up....  I would call the CEO or his wife and thank them for the article.  Tell them that you are getting ready to post it on the website and ask if they want to add anything else such as a photo or a graph or something.... then ask what they liked about the article to gauge how pleased they are with it.

What next?   Get the article posted and once it starts pulling some traffic get back in touch with them and ask for another article... then another... then another.   You might have opened a steady stream of content and this author will soon become the most widely read person in the industry.   Maybe she will become the equivalent to the Whiteboard Friday of the industry if she produces a stead stream of good content.

Thanks for letting me know about the New Yorker article.  That does make a difference.

I recently posted about this problem here..

In summary, I have three points...

1. The parameters control in Google Webmaster Tools is unreliable.  It did not work for me.  And, it does not work for any other search engine.  Find a different solution, is what I recommend.

2. Using rel=canonical relies on Google to obey it.  From my experience it works well at present time.  But we know that Google says how they are going to do things and then changes their mind without tellin' anybody.   I would not rely on this.

3. If you really want to control these parameters, use htaccess to strip them off at the server level.  That is doing it where you control it and not relying on what anybody says that they are going to do.  Take control.

The only reservation about #3 is that you might need parameters for on-site search or category page sorting on your own site.  These can be excluded from being stripped in your htaccess file.

Don't allow search engines to do anything for you that you can do for yourself.  They can screw it up or quit doing it at any time and not say anything about it.

Just read this interesting article about Yelp on SearchEngineWatch.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2364585/Court-Rules-Yelp-May-Demand-Money-for-Adding-and-Removing-Reviews

I can't believe that this would be considered a permitted form of "hard bargaining".

But, hard bargaining or not this is something that a "good business" would not do.

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.

What should be done with these domains?

I'd let them expire and use the savings to buy beer.

I got lots of beer money now that I allowed my domain collection to expire.   I probably could have made more money listing them on Sedo and waiting for dumbos to buy them.

I wonder why Google's PhD engineers didn't post detailed info about this?....  But, I can probably understand it better from the Moz blog.

They also should have warned people that it would tank their adsense earnings.

The form is probably obscuring your history and making you look like a new visitor with no attributable origin.

I want to produce an excel spreadsheet that I can use to identify the best use of my content  Writing time.

How to spend your content writing time?

My approach to this is very different.  I use subjective judgements rather than numbers of debatable quality.

My content plan is more of a Venn Diagram that maps the intersection of these things....

1. content that my website needs to be a more complete resource (search volume is important here, but people don't always search for what is important)

2. content that I believe my visitors will consume (visitor behavior is important here but content that will surprise and delight is a fantastic force that stimulates sharing)

3. content that aligns with my subject matter abilities

4. content that I will enjoy producing

Items #1 and #2 cover organic search and social sharing.  They also inform professional development and other investments that facilitate #3.  But, #4 is the most powerful force in getting things done and getting them done well.  If you don't have #4 then you have a race horse in front of a plow.   You ain't the guy or the team for this website.

You asked this same question a few days ago, three people answered.

http://moz.com/community/q/stolen-content-reposted-on-other-sites-how-does-this-affect-ranking

You didn't ask about this but I think that it is worth considering... Let's say that you have a wordpress install on somedomain.com/blog/ and another one on somedomain.com/anythingelse/.

The install at somedomain.com/blog/ is going to attract a lot more weasels and is almost askin' people to throw wrenches at you.

Just my two cents.

Does my logic make sense?

I don't want to guess.

If this was my site, I would want that answer coming from someone who has seen a lot of real estate sites and knows how the most successful in highly competitive real estate markets handle this problem.

Now that I see the site, I might understand why Google does not like it.

The community pages like the one that you gave as an example are signposts for a large number of noindex pages that mostly contain content that can be seen verbatim on many other websites.   A lot of people think that noindexing duplicate content is "best practice"... but I am not sure that is true when you have a lot of duplicate content that is out there on a lot of other websites.  Google is probably saying... "Oh no!  Another one!"

After seeing, I agree with you that the map is way oversized.  But I don't think that changing it is going to solve your problem.

I can't tell you how to solve your problem.  I think that real estate is tough because the content changes rapidly and lots and lots of websites are publishing the same stuff.  So, if this site belonged to me I would find an SEO consultant with deep experience in working on successful real estate sites in highly competitive markets who can study the site and give me advice.

Good luck.

I have LOTS of pages with a nice Google map, wonderful photo, interesting graph hogging the above-the-fold space.

I am not changin' anything.

If you have great stuff, one of the best presentations of your subject, above the fold and people are responding well to it then don't let kibitzers spreadin' rumors about "above the fold" content tanking your rankings scare you away from it.

I am out every day looking for, spending lots of money on, consulting with my photographer.... to get great face-slapping content to post above the fold to impress the Hell out of my visitors when they land.

When that stops working, I will be in here complaining.

One thing concerns me about your post and that is.....

"(rest is content which is not unique to my site)"

Note the word NOT in bold.  If the rest of your page is duplicate content then I think Google will probably discover that eventually and your page will be treated poorly.

If you have a little bit of content from elsewhere  on this page then just take the time to rewrite it or put it in the image if you are allowed to use it.

One more note.  I am quite confident that Google can figure out when images are reused from other websites.  I am not sure that can reduced your rankings at this time, but it might in the future.

This question was about one of my personal rants.  I couldn't help myself. 

Visitors often copy and paste my content and post it elsewhere...

Congratulations!   You must have great content!

... but they don't link to me.

Those weasels!

This happens with my content a lot.  It makes me mad.

How does Google treat this duplicated content?

They claim that they know where the content originated, but they are either overestimatin' their abilities or just lyin' about them.   Some people will argue in Google's favor but they don't know what they are talkin' about.  (If you are one of these people, I'll not argue with you, you can keep belivin' it.  I know I am right.)

What is the best way to handle it? File DCMA claims or ask them for a link?

These weasels probably don't have public whois and no contact info on their website.  If they do have contact info on their website it is probably phony.

If you can send them a message (and a human reads it) the message will probably be ignored, maybe even laughed at.  If you get a reply it will probably be the verbal equivalent of being flipped off.  Some people just don't understand copyright.  Some people understand copyright or are located where they can abuse the copyright of people in your country.  They have built a business out of stealing your content and mine.  They often have thousands of websites with your content and mine. They are making tons of munny.

If you file a DCMA, you better have absolute knowledge that the content truly belongs to you and that they are not displaying it under a valid "fair use", because they can sue you if you play this the wrong way.

The remaining people who steal your content, just don't know that they are stealing.  They think that anything on the web is fair game.  A lot of the stolen content is on legit websites.  They hired an SEO who hired someone else, in a country where copyright is not thought about, and they grabbed your content, slapped it on somebody's website and said that they wrote it just for the client.

Good luck.  Be careful.  Find a way to keep the blood pressure down.  Buy a punchin' bag.    My experience is, chasing weasels only gets you tired, most of them are only out after dark and you will never find them.

So, you can see that I think that this is harmful and it is really hard to do anything about it.

ADDED:  Got so busy in my rant I forgot to answer....

How does this affect ranking?

If you have a healthy, vigorous site, having a few pieces of stolen content on other websites will probably not hurt you if they are weak websites.  However, it can tank your rankings if the content is on strong websites - stronger than yours.  Also, it can kill your rankings if it is on lots of weak websites.

Examples:

I was selling some products that were made in China.  My content got grabbed by hundreds of Chinese websites publishing in English.  My rankings tanked.  Tanked.  The result was that I gave thousands of dollars worth of outdoor gear to Goodwill.

I had several articles about commodities (like what is traded on exchanges).  They ranked in the top three of google for searches on those commodities.  Tens of thousands (I am not joking) of spam commodities websites grabbed my articles or pieces of my articles and republished them.  My articles disappeared from google even though I had held those great rankings for a couple of years and they were on PR6 pages.  Fortunately, they have recently returned to good rankings and I am making money from them again but lost great revenue for a couple of years.

Thanks  for sharing.

Adding more...

The buttons from some shopping carts will work in .pdf documents.  So if you write one with a parts list, you can place a buy button beside each part to make it really easy for the person to purchase.

Also, type your domain name in the pdf.  That way, if people print it and want to go back to your website you might get a navigation query.   Typing the URL where it can be found might do the same thing.

Thanks for the update.  Glad you got it figured out.

The answer will depend to a degree on the load that your traffic places on the server and the quality of the equipment in your server.

If you get one with a nice amount of memory, fast processor and solid state harddrive then the speed increase could be so pronounced that you will be able to tell when it goes into service without being told... at the same time that could be overkill if your traffic is modest.

Getting efficient images and caching working could have a greater impact on speed than the equipment.

If you do both then you will have the best situation.

I agree with you.

It was a chest thumper article.  It simply crows about rigging a fix for historic bad practice.  It does not explain what caused the problem and the randon links solution isn't the best way to handle 404 traffic and probably not the best way to repair site structure problems.

It could be a parameter problem.

For example.  You might have a page with this URL...  example.com/hiking/boots.html

But, google has found bad links to it like this.... (the crap after the ? is a parameter)

example.com/hiking/boots.html?sa=Xeiy7z8U5v5CsGgyQThyICgAg&amp

If you have a parameter problem you can...

use rel=canonical

Declare them in   Webmaster Tools >> Crawl >> URL parameters

Strip them off with htaccess and a 301 redirect

I agree.  If the author was a talented writer then you will lose the benefit of their authority if you change the attribution to "nobody".  If the writer continues to produce good work in the future then you will benefit from the growth of their authority over time.

Google says that someday they will start ranking the works of authoritative writers higher in search.

I have been writing as part of my profession for about 40 years.  The first works that I produced still have my name on them.  My past employers have not scrubbed my name from my work.

Today, with authorship in Google, your employees might get very angry they see you scrub authorship when someone leaves.  If they did good work for you they will want to carry that with them.  So, if you want to get the best possible work out of your authors they best not see you scrubbing credit for their work.

Keep in mind that a powerful author leaving your biz and going to your competitor will help your competitor as well.... but at the same time the work that they do for your competitor will also be helping you.  Nothing like having a competitor paying for some authority that flows through to your website.

And EGOL, what is it that bothers you about the links to other sites?

The blog looks like a link factory.  Are these being sold?  Are they being traded?  Simply by volume there will be links in there to other websites that have been penalized by Google.  Inbound or outbound links can cause a site to have a problem with Google's Penguin algorithm.

Site-wide links in the footer have been a known method of google manipulation for about ten years.  If Prophoto and NetRivet have dozens or hundreds of other sites giving them site-wide links in the footer that could cause a problem.  I would get rid of those links if this was my  website.  They are not necessary.  The site will look better without these advertising links.

**Most photographers actually do use commenting as a means to up their DA/PA. **

That statement proves an observation that I have made.

I look at Moz Q&A every day and pay attention to sites that see rankings drops.  Photographers are waaayyy overrepresented in the sites that post here with problems.  If you do a few searches of Q&A you will find lots of photographers in here cryin' because their sites have great metrics but apparently weak competitors are beating them.

**Most photographers do this as a way to promote vendors that were at the wedding. **

Photographers link to other wedding vendors and other wedding vendors link back to photographers... they do this every week.  Over and over for hundreds of weddings.  It creates a pattern that is easy to spot and looks like manipulation.  They, or their agents, have also spent countless hours finding open photography blogs where they can place a ten word comment and get a link or two.

Their metrics are through the roof compared to everyone else's. They've dropped from 27 in May to 40 Now. 'A' Grade on-site optimization.

This sounds exactly like a site that has been penalized for link spam.  Great moz grading, great link metrics, rankings lower than expected in Google.

Just offering what I would do if this was my site.  No guarantees.

.

I feel the same way about the ads.  They are like a bad dog that rushes at you when you approach the property line and chases you down the street.  Worse even than Forbes - and they are really bad IMO.

You can do this and it might be helpful.   But, I am betting that TechCruch had big problems from tons of systematically deleted pages.

So, Neil Patel did not really "create" this traffic, he simply "salvaged" it... grabbed it before it went down the drain as a result of sloppy work by TechCrunch....  and like most "salvaged goods" it was probably low quality traffic after being 404ed and disappointed.

Moz explains why they don't have phone support here...

http://moz.com/help/guides/moz-procedures/phone-support

It is an interesting read and the articles that they link to on Wistia, Raven Tools, and Sticker Mule are also enlightening.  I have used ideas from these four pages for my own business.

If you have a question, just post it here in Q&A.   Lots of smart people reply to questions here.  You might find a few friends or even allies.   Moz would cost a lot more if they offer phone support.

We have moved our place of business a couple of times. Big job. Everyone has also been out of the office for a conference.

Method 1) Move on Friday and have it done by Monday... maybe you can pick a three day weekend. Have a big sale on your bulky items for a couple weeks before the move. GET SOME SHELVES EMPTY. Place restocking order with supplier so that it arrives at your new location early in the week after your move.

Start moving all nonessential items on Thursday, anything that you can get out of there. Leave only what pack-and-ship people need to operate on Friday at the old location. Get minimal furniture and computers in the new location and operating on Thursday. Get empty inventory shelving at the new location ready to accept inventory. Take anything to the new location that you can.

On Friday, pack-and-ship people arrive early and get all orders picked and packed and shipped. As soon as pack-and-ship people are finished the moving team yanks their furniture and supplies and takes it to new location.Pack inventory in boxes and move shelving to new location before inventory. LABEL THE BOXES WITH SHELF NUMBERS.

Friday night, Saturday and Sunday moving team gets all shelving, inventory, and pack-and-ship supplies and furniture set up at new location. Pack-and-ship people work during the weekend to get the inventory back on the shelves as they want it. Don't let the moving crew do this or pack-and-ship people will be cussing.

Monday morning, pack-and-ship people are ready to go, starting a little early so they have extra time to be ready for your package pickup people. Pay overtime and a nice bonus for everyone's hard work.

2. Method 2)... place a big face-slapping sign on every page of your site and even bigger in the checkout. "We are moving to a new location. Please feel free to shop but know that orders will not ship until (fill in date)."

I think that a lot of people are looking for "easy" and when an article or a Q&A response explains that you gotta do hard work, a few people will give it the thumbs down.  Some people might also think that some articles are not as good as others that have appeared on the moz blog or that an article is irrelevant to me and I assume to most other people.

Some people might have constructive critique or negative comments that they don't want to post in public.   These could be very valuable to moz and to authors.  So, a link somewhere on the article where private feedback could be submitted could be a way to collect them.  If this is implemented it should be clear to the communicator that this is not an avenue for private consultations - just a way for you to share something with the author or with moz that might not receive a reply.

We are looking to implement Google Trusted Stores.  We don't use PPC but we think that the badge on our website will be helpful for us and our customers.

Do you have any experience, positive or negative, with Google Trusted Stores as either a merchant or a customer?  I am looking for moz member experience before we make a commitment.

There have been some previous Q&A threads about Trusted Stores and a number of good articles on the web, including this one at SearchEngineLand. and this one at eConsultancy

Thanks for anything that you care to share.

I didn't know that about Chrome.

I just visited a few pages of the sites that I mentioned in other browsers and could not get an https to stick on nsa.gov and state.gov and some others.  Are you seeing https on nsa.gov and state.gov?

I have learned not to behave like a trained dog and jump through hoops at Google's command.  They often don't have their ducks in a row when they tell you to do stuff (the case here in WMT), they often change their mind about stuff that they tell you to do (authorship), and they often do things differently without tellin' anybody (nofollow).

If you have read what people who immediately jumped through this https hoop have to say about their experience you know that some of them are cussin' about it.  (And, not one of them said that they see any positive difference in their SERPs.)

Amazon does not have https even when they say "Hi EGOL".... ebay doesn't have https even when I am in my bidding account,... and MattCutts.com does not have https.   Wikipedia didn't do it.  The WhiteHouse didn't do it.  The Pope doesn't got it.   And, NSA, Department of State and Interpol are still farting around.

Must not be too important because Moz doesn't have it yet.

So, keep fightin' the fight and do this https stuff after Christmas.... if then.

The only websites that I know that have long been completely on https are google, wikileaks and CIA.

Your 1, 2 and 3 are nice.... but if your article isn't one of the best on the web for its topic and about a topic that lots of people are searching for then you are wasting your money. My experience is... you don't find that kind of writer by askin' people. You find that type of writer by getting into the SERPs where you want your rankings to happen and find someone who knows their stuff, is good at explaining and has access to awesome images... because somebody who wrote a kickass article for me about knitting is probably going to suck at writing about hydraulic jacks for you.  If this person is writing for other people then you might be able to talk him or her into writing for you... but if that person is writing for his or her own website then they will probably know the value of their writing and you will really have to pay a obscene price to get them writing for you.

Marie Haynes is a moz member who has written extensively on unnatural link penalties - much of it published here on moz.

You can see her profile page here. Scroll down to the listing of her posts and note that she writes about unnatural links penalty removal.

She has published multiple times on this topic at Search Engine Watch.

She published a guide to unnatural links recovery here.

Interview here that touches on how she got into diagnosing website problems.

A lot of the links fit the pattern of the examples below.  Google probably sees this and thinks that the only reason these links exist is because someone deliberately spent a lot of time finding a couple hundred photography blog posts where they could type less than ten words and obtain a link, or two, or three.   They would call it blog spamming because the links were manufactured - not given on merit.

Three examples....

http://paperphotographs.com/blog/2012/04/02/columbus-senior-portraits-carly-whetstone-park-of-roses/

http://alexmillerweddings.co.uk/blog/benjamin-arrives/

http://www.jackchauvel.com/the-year-that-was-2013/

If this was my site I would get rid of the site-wide footer links to ProPhoto and NetRivet.  If they are being paid for their service then linking to them is probably not a requirement.  If it is a requirement and I am paying I would leave them simply on principle.

Another thing that bothers me is that the blog posts each have a load of links out to other sites.  This, I would think, is unnecessary.  I would stop doing this and take a sharp ax to what is currently out there.

There are a few choices for managing parameters.  I have used....

A)  The URL parameter manager in the "crawl" options of Google Webmaster Tools.  I have found it to be totally unreliable.

B)  Rel=canonical.  It is much more reliable than WMT but you still must rely on search engines to discover it and obey - which can be slow to take effect and is less than 100% effective.

I have not used robots.txt because I think that it would have similar performance to rel=canonical.

I have the belief that you shoud not trust search engines to do things for you that you can do for yourself with 100% reliability.  So, I am doing ......

C). Managing parameters on my server with .htaccess so I have 100% control.

I would be hesitant to trust this type of work to anyone.

So, if I wanted fresh ideas, I would visit the websites of firms who have turned legal services into a manufacturing process.  I would especially look at PPC landing pages of firms that I felt were especially tech savvy.  I would spend a couple mornings looking at these, following their clickpaths to conversion and watching for kickass ideas that inspire me to use as a starting point with the goal of making something even better.   I might get consultation from someone like SiteTuners.

I think that I would get better results this way than by hiring a person who knows little about my business.

I can only say that I would not use it for my own content.

If you go there, grab a random sentence from many of the articles and put it between quotes as a google search, you will see that the same content is often published on may other sites.

Lots of the content there is yada yada yada, IMO.

For real estate you must get really good at Local SEO.  And when you do local SEO then, in my opinion, DA and PA have even less importance.

If I was going into local SEO, I would hire a local SEO consultant to get me started in the right direction.  Local real estate rankings can be highly competitive in large cities and in smaller communities where major players or really smart people have a presence.

Knowing how to win is the first step.

Here is all I can say.

I run small publishing and niche ecommerce biz with three full time people (counting me); help from a couple smart consultants for technical work and SEO;  two people working very part time on admin stuff; and occasional help from freelancers for artwork or programming.

The small guy can survive if he has expertise in a business niche, can present ideas well on the web and has the ability to get all of the technical details right or hire someone to get them done right.  But you gotta work hard, pick the right niche, and have a nose for what people want, need or don't realize what they want or need.  All of those stars must come together to make the constellation.

In my opinion, DA and PA, because they correlate with the observed ranking ability of a page or a domain, can be used as a general measure of a site's ability to rank.

You can use that to monitor the progress of your site over time or to compare your site with other sites in a very general way.

I don't use them.

If I want to know how I stack up with another domain I check Google's rankings.  And, if I want to compete for a keyword or a set of keywords that cover a product or an industry, I just jump in.  I am not going to allow a third party metric to encourage me or scare me off.

Being honest, I am confused about why moz publishes these numbers and provides very little guidance on how they can be used for practical purposes.   DA and PA are in my opinion, the most frequent topic of angst in Q&A.

People spend so much time trying to understand why they have a higher DA then the guy who ranks above them when the answer is... DA and PA have nothing to do with your google rankings... get to work improving your website... that will impact your "rankings and bankings".