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....is like hiring an astronaut, handing them a box of toothpicks and some gunpowder and saying you expect them to land on the moon

ha ha ha... that is really funny.

Thanks for the laugh.

I don't have an answer for you... but I will say that it would really bother me that I would have to jump through hoops with a pogo stick to get stakeholders to want to address this.

I'll skip my rant and get right to the analysis.....

What's going on?   Are these stakeholders:  A) dumb?   B) lazy?    C) short of resources?   D) frying bigger fish?

If it is A or B then I am probably looking for another job before the company goes bankrupt.

If it is D then I might decide if I should resign and go into competition with them to cash in on the bonanza.

If it is C then you have a dilema that could involve going to the stakeholders boss, other creative solutions or looking for a new job.

Really, you should not have to ask this question.

**These things seem to be more and more important. **

Yes... good addition... we just had some speed work done a couple of weeks ago.  Good investment even if no rankings increase results.

The data that you posted are mainly onpage and offpage metrics.    See what you can do to beat these other sites on visitor engagement....  Start with clickthrough rate from the SERPs.  See what you can do to elicit clicks away from the other sites...

-- offer a kickass price in the title tag

-- offer immediate free shipping in the title

-- tell them you have the "Secrets to Success"

-- tell them you have "Free Beer"

These will get potential customers onto your website.

Then do things to lower your bounce rate.  Offer lots of related content or related products on every page.  This will entice people to view another page and keep them on your site longer.   I use big image menus for alternative reading on the right side of the page... and the bottom of the article I have a site search box and more reading options... within most articles I have links to related content.  Keep them on your site.

Figure out what you can do to have people ask for you by name.   Do you have content that brings people back regularly and typing "yourdomain.com" into google search as a navigational query.  Regular news, regular blog posts, a continuous stream of contests, daily deals, giveaways, coupons.   When you have this kind of stuff people return to your site regularly.   If google sees that people are asking for you by name then you might get a boost.  (this takes real work btw)

These are just a few things to try.. might not work but even if they don't they each bring other benefits.

Sometimes I think that Mr. Cutts will say these things knowing that many webmasters will believe him and stop doing what Google wants them to stop doing.  Then later they may make some algorithmic changes...

I think you are right!   Thanks for the laugh.

**Anyone seen a dip in rankings from their high-quality blog post strategy?    **

Just browse through Q&A here and look for posts with a title something like......  "Wah!  my rankings dropped."   You can see plenty of people are still getting smacked.

Probably part of the reason is that people who are doing "high quality guest posts" today were doing "spam quality guest posts" last year and have that link profile on their site.... and some of the people who think that they are doing "high quality guest posts" today are really doing "spam quality guest posts".

One of my competitors had a designer put a new look on their website.   As soon as they uploaded it we went to the site to sniff the code.  We saw that the developer left the "noindex" on all of the files.  We laughed and laughed about that.  Within a few days their entire site dropped out of search and it took them a couple weeks to figure out what happened while we enjoyed a big increase in sales.   But, when they uploaded the site with the noindex removed, within a few days the pages were mostly back in search and two weeks later they were back to normal.

The amount of time required is influenced by the amount of spider action received by the site.  If your site has low PageRank and does not receive a lot of spider action you can go much longer without being reindexed.  Deep pages on a site without much spider action can take weeks to come back.  The site in the example above is a PR6 site with mostly PR3 and PR4 pages.

Instead of making "slideshows" I place all of my photos on a big single page with lots of generous captions.   Then when people land on those pages they say ... WOW!

Some of my big pages full of images are ranking well in google for very difficult queries.

A lot of people don't like slideshows because they have to click, wait, click, wait, click, wait.  I don't like them.  That's why I don't use them.

Google can see a slideshow as a whole page with one image and not a lot of text.  They might think that the purpose is to get visitors to click click click and display a lot of ads.  It would not be a surprise to see google judge a big page with twelve images and 1000 words as much more deserving of rankings than a single slideshow page.  That's why I don't see slideshows ranking above my big pages with a lot of images.  Plus, if you have a lot of pages like that on your website then you could have a panda problem for thin content.

lol... Yes, but you can do BOTH.

I remember that goat project.  The kid was the pitch man and the old man had all of the expertise.

So what you are saying is less emphasis on KWs and more emphasis on ideas?

Not quite.  What I am saying, is that if you have ideas don't allow volume or bidding or pricing data to frighten you away or discourage you.  There could be a lot of money out there.  It might be widely distributed but it still can be profitable.   I have made nice money by casting a wide net.

Now, changing to a different philosophy....  one that has been more successful for me....   I use the Adwords keyword planner, but in a different way.

I first ask myself... What are the keywords for which I have the expertise, enthusiasm and content creation ability to be highly competitive?   Then I go to those SERPs and look at the content that is out there right now.  If I can beat it then I am ready to attack.  That is the time to look at the keyword planner and determine the exact point of attack and what the keyword data tells me should be explained on my page(s).  That is the information that everybody everywhere is asking about.  If everybody is asking then it might not be addressed well on the web.  The keyword planner data informs content development around the topics that people are asking about. Address them.  All of them.

Again I don't allow the keyword planner data to sway my thinking.  If it says... "Highly competitive" and "high volume" then I am not frightened off.  Why? Because where there is high levels of competition and high levels of traffic there is usually a lot of search diversity and a lot of money changing hands.  Even if you get in there for long tail queries you can make a lot of money.  But since I attack where I am confident that I can compete head-on with their content that is exactly where I do NOT want the presence of competition to discourage me.

So, I attack and it often works well.  Do not fear competition.  That is where money is made as long as you have what it takes to compete.

I know that you are asking for something to say to these guys...  but your post has wondering about a few things because my approach is very different.

My overall reaction is.....   Three websites??

I would pick the one with the highest potential and put all of my energy and ideas into it.  It is really hard to fight a new war on three fronts.  The strategy of the smartest generals is usually "divide and conquer".  So, I would unite my efforts onto a single site.  Progress should then move faster.

You say that the sites are pulling a little traffic and that traffic numbers are growing.  That is good.   Now, if you are getting traffic then that should be resulting in some conversions ( as long as your efforts are acquiring quality traffic ).

Assuming that you have quality traffic you should be able to determine your conversion rate.   If your conversion rate is low for the industry and for a new site of the type that you have built then your work should be focusing there.   If your conversion rate is good then show that to the client and point to the rising traffic numbers.

Conversion rates can fail because of the website or the traffic that it is getting.  It can also fail because the website is selling undesirable goods, goods that are not competitively priced, goods are poorly described, images are ugly, shipping rates that are too high, or shopping carts that are inefficient, and for other reasons.   I would look there because no sales might be a result of client business model and not because you are performing poorly at your part of the project.

Find USA companies who do not ship to Canada and ask them to refer visitors to you on their shipping policies page.

I will also note that our website recently launched, we are using 100% original product page content, we are using videos, and we are really putting a lot of energy into quality content. I am just wondering if patience is the name of the game when you are dealing with sites with incredible domain authority, or if we are better off trying to find niche opportunities.

Original content is highly commendable.  I am one who uses and recommends the content attack almost exclusively.  But, the real key is how fast you are able to shovel.  If you can shovel 100 tons per hour but your competitors are using these... then you are wasting your money.... but if the commodity that you are shoveling has a higher value per ton, then you might have a chance.

Is it a correct assumption that if the KW doesn't have a suggested bid, there's probably not going to be a real impact in optimizing for it?

Some people know how to make big money in niches where nobody else has ever guessed (the people who can sell manure or dirt are examples).  It is who knows how to do something valuable with that traffic - even if the money per keyword is small.  A little money here and a little money there... ads up to big money.

Looking where others have ignored can make you highly successful.   Some of the biggest oil discoveries have been made where no one else ever thought to drill, and where many believed that  there was none to be found.

We have a client who has a "friend" who says he can get keyword phrases that include their business name to show up in Google's auto suggest when doing a search.

There are a number of methods of generating domain or brand queries.  They can often be associated with keywords.  I a couple of sites that get thousands of visitors per month through domain navigational queries, often combined with a keyword.     Here are a couple ideas.

Have something on your site that is absolutely awesome, astounding, better than anyone else.  If you have great photos of seashells, the best damn collection on the web, and word gets around that you are THE PLACE FOR SEASHELLS then lots of people could type "yourdomain.com seashells" into google search.  This isn't easy to pull off, you gotta earn it, you gotta be awesome but it can be done.

Give a printable freebie away with your domain name clearly showing on it as the destination for more great stuff... Let's say you publish a free printable guide to seashells.   You could have "Visit yourdomain.com for seashell information"   on it.  Iff your guide is awesome then lots of people will visit your site by typing in the domain.

If your site has new content daily about subjects that people are highly interested in and dedicated to then people will start using search engines to navigate straight to your site.

I have not done this one but I know of someone who has a contest running all of the time.  A prize is given frequently.  Lots of people go to that site regularly, repeatedly to enter the contest.  Lots of them get to the site by typing "hisdomain.com xxxxx contest" into google.

Bottom line.  Do something that brings people back to your site again and again and again.

This is not for the wannabe who is looking for the easy way to pull traffic into his website.  It is for the person who is full of enthusiasm and panache and not afraid of dedicating himself to hard and persistent work.

Also, these are not ways to influence autocomplete.  Changes in autocomplete are a result of doing the above.

Content like this will probably do it...

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0839/_PMV.HTM

"Many a man who asks for a loan adds to the burdens of those who help him; If the lender is able to recover barely half, he considers this an achievement;"

Does anyone knows who are the best people in that field.. I am looking for the best of the best .

How will you tell when you find a good one?

Looks like one of the NG bloggers got some infographics from paydayloans.co.uk and posted them on the NatGeo blog

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/09/28/is-it-green-to-be-green/

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/24/great-depression-vs-great-recession/

Even though NG is a white hat site (almost up there with the Pope's site), it is possible that Google thought that the loan guys were sneaking in some spammy infographic links.  One of those posts give two links to paydayloans.co.uk and to another site in the loan sector.  If I was the editor at NG those posts would not have been approved.

NatGeo looks to be a favorite target of the payday loan linkbuilders.

just sayin.....

This site is displaying a lot of images that they probably do not own...  images owned by companies who are really really aggressive in going after infringers.    In 2012, Google said that they were getting millions of DMCA notices EVERY MONTH and were taking action against sites that get repeated complaints.  The Pirate Update. More here.

This might not be the problem you are seeing at this time... but if they don't have permission for the images would be a good thing to get under control.

No..... but if you IMPROVE them occasionally it could be beneficial.

we didn't think that they would be ranked higher just because of more products

    Glad you have your BS meter running.

So should our limited resources be focused on getting better links, better content, or increasing our depth of product range?

A good and reliable answer to that question would require considerable study of your website, of your competitors, of your business niche and of the characteristics and financial health of your business.

It is not a good idea to take action on advice based upon shallow information.

Get 'em a Google Voice number and redirect it to the third party people.  This will give the website owner some data about how many calls are coming in, when they are calling, if they are being answered, and where they are coming from.  He can also then redirect the calls anywhere, take them himself if he wants or allow to ring through to third party.  Very versatile.  Free.

Yes, "eligible to rank" and "competitive enough to rank" are the key differences.

This site is not competitive enough to rank for the very very general terms that are in the title tags of the posts.

Plus, as I pointed out above this site has a lot of very very thin content and that could have its rankings reduced because of a panda problem.

Getting to actionable items... If this was my site I would....

1. delete all of the pages that have just a few sentences and a link to another website... and stop creating them

2. start writing posts that focus on very specific topics that will not face enormous competition and have title tags that consist of a few very common words

3. any post that I did write would be deep, substantive, beefy content

And, I would evaluate if search is the best place to get traffic for this type of website.   Commiserative topics can pull traffic much more effectively from social media rather than search.... but then you have a community that might be viewed as an alternative to the service that this site seems to be selling.

I don't offer SEO services to others because I am fully committed to my own sites.  But if I did offer SEO services and the owner of this site asked me to help, I would decline because I don't see an easy way to bring her ROI.

"You are in a forest of trees that are really hard to tell apart or in a haystack with so many pieces of hay that getting yours showing up at the top of the search engines is going to be improbable."

I have been using plain text to caption my images.. .but the page that you shared looks like a better idea.  It communicates that you are writing about an image.

I have not used that coding but I think it would work well. Perhaps better than what I use.

Thanks!

I have image captions that are typed as text into Wordpress.   I have image captions that have been created as HTML in Dreamweaver.   Both of these work fine.

On many of my pages I have a gray caption box beneath each image and a colored title box above each image.  The color in the title box is taken from the image so that it looks nice.  Just make a CSS style to format the title and caption box.

Pages with lots of images can be great assets for your website.   I have pages with 40 to 50 to 100 images (nice size images) that rank at the top of Google for really really difficult queries - and in my opinion the images are the reason why these pages rank so well.  People love visual content - especially if it is beautiful, interesting, surprising, funny, etc (long list of other reasons).

"The other part, and I see this happen a lot especially with bigger clients, is when you put lots and lots of images on one page, like an image gallery, those pages tend to be very hard to get indexed. The reason for that is there's not a lot unique textual content. A lot of times it's just overwhelming to users. It doesn't provide a lot of benefit in a search result."

heh... my response to this is... Get off of your butt and write some captions.  If you have created all of those awesome images you must know something about them.  They say an image is worth a thousand words.  Get busy.  If visitors see a great image they want to know.... Who?  Where?  How?  WTF?   Should be really easy for you to write that.

I have some pages where I have spent $1000 to $2000 just to create the images.  Some are graphics, some are photos, some are graphs based upon data.  Images are my best content and my competitive advantage.  I spend thousands of dollars a month to create and acquire some of the best images in my industry.

It sounds like you have a lot of great images and are sitting on a fantastic opportunity.  Write about your images and see what happens.  You might be surprised at what happens.

Those pages look just about identical to me.   The top paragraph to left of the map is almost identical... then the huge block of "directions and lodging information" is identical and a lot of words.

If this was my site, I would do this...

1. Rewrite unique content for the top paragraph beside the map.  Would take a bit of work but I would do it.   Its is not hard writing.

2. For the "Directions and Lodging Information" ... I would place that on a separate page and link to it.   That eliminates a LOT of duplicate content from the NYC pages.

If this was my site I would not publish the pages as I see them today... but would feel good publishing all 800 if I did 1 and 2 above.

Honestly... if these are all pages with great, original, unique, substantive, non-duplicating content... I would blast them up right now.   800 ain't that many.... and if you are a white hat then google should be OK with it.

SEO is a competitive industry.  You are going out there to fight the heavyweight champ.  Do you  want to send a guy who has kickass rankings or do you want to send the guy who sipped coffee and farted through a bunch of meetings?

I point to the Adwords professional exam.  What is the passing score?  Do you want a guy doing bidding who got a 70% on his exam?  That means 30% of your money is being blown.  Google should require 98% for a passing score.

I don't know.   I have been making websites for a long time.  I've seen google treat subdomains like gold and stack them in the SERPs so that subdomains on a single domain will fill the top ten and push all competitors down.  Then I've seen google treat subdomains like crap, then like gold again.

So, don't bet on today's flavor.  Keep in mind that lots of domains have subdomains managed by other people.  Do you think that the actions of those "other people" should make the rest of the domain stink if they are crappy?   If you think that your subdomain should not stink if the rest of the domain is populated by idiots then go ahead and place your big  bet on subdomains being treated equally.  I'm not going to do it.  Do you think that blogspot blogs are treated like a single site?  I vote NO on that.  Do you agree?

If you want your collection of content to be guaranteed support for your main site then you better put it in a folder.  I am putting my good content in a folder and staying away from hosts, shopping carts, software, platforms and any service that can't handle putting my content in a folder.

Google changes their mind on this type of stuff all of the time.  So bet on what you think is long-term certain and not on what you hear people sayin' even if Matt Cutts is the one who is sayin'.  I remember him posting right here on moz (SEOmoz then) that you could sculpt pagerank with nofollow.  Then Google changed their mind on that and didn't tell anybody.

Do what makes long term sense, not what people are sayin'.  I think that smart people are still saying put your  content in a folder.

There are plenty of sites doing this successfully, and they don't have any problems.

I agree with Bill's answer.... but I think that this is something that Google or other search engines could change their mind about.

I write a blog that links out to a couple dozen articles on the web every week.  I don't link to anything that is behind a read gate.  Why?  I believe that most of my visitors will be disappointed to hit the readgate.

I think that Google could see searchers click on a listing in the SERPs, hit a read gate, bounce off, and decide that they did not give the searcher a good experience - and thus demote the content behind read gates.  If I was the boss at Google, that is what we would be doing.

But its hard to know what is right and what is wrong. For years a phone book is all we needed, now we want to be found.

I understand.  When I was starting out I spent a lot of time reading the basics of SEO.  Moz has lots of resources for people who are learning.  You can read the beginner's guide and ask questions here.  It is also a good idea to record the changes that you make on your site, what works, what doesn't and use that as a source of learning.

The most valuable thing that I did was to start a site and then hire an experienced person to do a study and review.  That person spend a couple hours learning about my business, looking at my website and then gave me an opinion of what I might do.  That kept me going down the right road.  Still, now, after about ten years and a nice amount of experience, I am still working on websites and still getting paid advice from people who are smarter than me and people who think differently than me and people who know how to do technical work that I don't want to spend time learning.  I do 98% of the work myself but smarts, opinions and tech savvy from others are very important.

I'm just a small local company trying to survive.

If this is the case... if you get most of your business from a certain city then you should be putting your time and brains and effort into local search.

** if a company has facebook likes, twitter posts, great backlink profile and content, then you should be able to go by whatever domain I would think?**

You have to beat your competitors by having a stronger web presence.  The domain is only part of it or maybe none of it.  Right now if people know you by our name and you plan to remain a small local company then your name might be a better choice of domain... like EgolsConstruction.com.    I might not use that (or ColoradoGarageBuilders.com) if I was a younger person because I might decide to build homes or barns or do paving someday... and people who want those services might say.... :"EgolsGarages.com"...  don't get them, they can build garages but would probably screw up building a house.  Keyword domains can be very limiting.

I know a guy who does roofing in my community who has no web presence, does not advertise, does not give estimates, doesn't even have a truck with his name on it and he is flooded with work because he has been in business a long time and has done great work and everybody knows him.

The sign of an established business is a good reputation and immediate access to lots of work.  You don't even need a website, in fact it might cause phone calls and queries that eat your time.

a few years ago he is quoted to have said how Google was going to crack down on EMD's

Matt did say that and Google did do that.  But they mainly hit EMDs that had crap content.  EMDs that had robust content were not really hurt.  The value of the EMD might have been diminished a bit but they are still slightly favored.

Slightly favored means that they will rank well in low competition with few links, however, against major competition the advantage is very small.  They still have to earn their position.

I think to myself, as long as I get a good social, link, and content profile, I am going to compete with them.

If they have any strength at all that will not happen.  I advocate EMDs but not for that reason.  If you think you can buy an EMD and loaf, you will be disappointed.

garagebuildercolorado.com

I think that domain sounds spammy.  Very few people are going to type "garage builder colorado" into search.  That is the exact match.  What will it get you?  Sounds like somebody talking who doesn't know proper English.  I would not use it.  It sounds like a spammy domain and not the domain of a business.

I would use ColoradoGarageBuilders.com if I owned a business that lived up to that name by building garages all over Colorado.  buildergaragescolorado and garagebuildercolorado are domains registered because somebody wants to stuff keywords.  Just my two cents and personal opinions.

I use all EMDs and have spent good money to obtain them.  I believe that they compete better if you place good content on them.  In my opinion they convert better and are easier remembered by your visitors.

It is really hard to create a brand if you are competing nationally or globally, however, an EMD can make it easier for you to be remembered, in my opinion.

A lot of people think that EMDs are penalized.  In my opinion that is BS.  They still give some advantage if you have the Exact Match Domain and not a partial match or an exact match and a word.  If I thought that EMDs were penalized or any disadvantage I would be out of them, instead they are kicking butts.

Most important, the EMD gives me mental energy to work on the site.  If I have that the competition is in trouble.

I think that you are going to get a lot of "opinions" on this question.

Being able to point to a site in difficult SERPs that has white-hat kick-ass rankings and being able to say that you helped that site succeed should be fairly good proof.... but then there is the question of how much did that cost vs how much is the site earning.

Honestly... so many people go to training sessions to sit there, sip coffee and fart... they are putting in their time away from the office thinking that they are getting educated.  Field performance paired with ROI is the only real metric that you can count on.

And.... an SEO who turns down jobs because he can't see good potential ROI in the project for the client is probably an honest person and a good SEO.  How many SEOs turn down jobs for that reason?

The highest numbers that I see for my sites in that column is 10.  Nice to know that higher numbers are possible.

A query will be listed in Google Webmaster Tools when you have a page that competes in the top ten on the web for that query.  Considering two things:  1) the enormous number of websites that compete for the words in the queries that I listed above; and, 2) the small amount of authority possessed by the site that we are discussing, I don't find it surprising that it is only in the top ten for a very small number of queries.

I agree that three is pretty small, but most of the title tags have nothing but extremely common words and that puts them in competition with milllions of other sites.  They will not be in the Google Top Ten.

The other possibilities are:

1. the site is extremely weak (this is true in my opinion and it compounds the common keyword problem)

2. the site has a panda problem because of thin content.  I found a lot of pages on the site that were really thin content.  Here are a few.  I could find a lot more.

http://www.liveathomeseniors.com/learn-about-home-health-care/

http://www.liveathomeseniors.com/keep-your-aging-parents-safe-at-home/

http://www.liveathomeseniors.com/managed-care-at-home/

http://www.liveathomeseniors.com/why-hire-a-geriatric-care-manager/

http://www.liveathomeseniors.com/optimal-aging/

http://www.liveathomeseniors.com/exercise-keeps-aging-brains-healthy-see-more-evidence/

A lot of these types of pages will tank a site.  I would stop making them and get rid of the ones that exist.

I can't see the forest for the trees.

I looked at the title tags of the content and I think that they are in that forest of trees.

For example..... these titles....

What could you do to bring joy to your heart?

Gifts of Family Memories

Medicare Open Enrollment 2013: Part D Prescription Drug

Keeping Your Aging Parents Safe at Home

Learn About Home Health Care

The topics of these blog posts are either:  A) composed of very common words that do not distinguish them in search; or, B) go up against an enormous enormous number of other pages on extremely powerful sites with the same words.

You are in a forest of trees that are really hard to tell apart or in a haystack with so many pieces of hay that getting yours showing up at the top of the search engines is going to be improbable.

Pulling in traffic from search with the types of titles that you currently have is going to be very difficult for a small site without a lot of power.   To generate traffic from search, in my opinion, will require writing about topics and titles that have some more unique words that still have search volume.

I used to live in a tiny tiny town and someone asked me about getting a brand new site ranked for "gift baskets".  There were almost zero customers who would drive to the town to purchase one.  That left national search competition to obtain traffic.  There are so so so many sites selling gift baskets that the resources required to become competitive would be enormous.  Even going after long tail queries would be extremely hard because the web is so flooded with competitors.  That, in my opinion, is what you are facing for these "common word" and "massive competition" queries.

Figure out a way to find topics that are not so crowded and competitive.  Some of the current blog posts might be able to be retitled or refocused but it is probably better to build from scratch than recreate.

ha ha...

That Seattle insurance domain is pretty clean if you ask me.  I don't think that Google would damn it.

How about cheap-viagra-Rx.info

Just guessing...  I don't think that google will kill a site because of the domain... but I think that only a certain type of person would register certain domains.  So, probably a pretty good bet that they will do something that gets a really spammy domain toasted.

When the same article appears on two websites and one of those has an rel=canonical pointing to the other website, then the site with the rel=canonical should not be indexed.

I don't think that you are going to get good actionable advice on this site in a forum.  There are too many factors to consider, too much time and expertise required to do an assessment.

Just saying that you should not take action based upon kibitzin'.

Right... and I bet that they would be really embarrassed to say who is "liking them".... or maybe they would spin the explanation into some real BS.

Maybe you have seen this video?  Most of the FB likes are BS.

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

In my opinion, people who have the most successful websites do not pay any attention to DA and PA.  They pay even less attention to the DA and PA of their competitors.  Instead they are spending that time making their site awesome.

If I was teaching SEO, DA and PA would not be part of the curriculum.

Traffic has more than doubled, links sending visits has doubled, external followed links is 500% up, keywords sending is way up, pages within the site have way more links and are more diverse in their own SEO....

Nice work.

....  but no matter what I can't get PA and DA to budge

Why are you worshiping this stuff?

I spend about 1/3 of my time improving the content on a long-established site.   Articles are made current, more substantive, new data, updated graphs , additional Images.

I often see an almost immediate improvement in rankings.

These are not just tweaks to a few sentences.  They are major rewrites.  An article of 1000 words and three images might get a new introduction that hits topics in the news and two or three new subheadings and two additional images and an updated data table.

Rankings can go up within a couple of weeks.

Is it me? Or is the spam getting worse....?

Yes, I think that it is YOU....   Somebody discovered that YOU are an "influencer" or a "kickasser" or "well connected nice guy".... so they submitted your name and email address to one of those "people you need to know" lists.  Now, everybody in the planet is after you to do something for them.

Somebody seems to have submitted me as blogger in a couple of industries and now I am getting "reaching out to you" messages from a ton of idiots.

Honestly... I have seen stuff recommended on SEO and marketing sites and within a few days a bunch of idiots are hitting me with the same BS - almost always poorly done.

One thing that I like about gmail is the filters.  I can send messages from an unlimited number of idiots, strategies and even entire domains to my trash.  I have not seen a message from linkedin for a long time. They are going straight to trash.

How about Google giving any idiot on the planet who can find you on Google+ the ability to send email to you.  They want to use other people as a marketing point for their service.... but really... they are killing the best members.  They should do a study on who is leaving.  I bet who is leaving has a higher average rep score than the people who are stayin',

I would use domain.com/anythingbutblog because there are tons of scrapers and spammers who are crawling the web for /blog/ so they can grab your content and publish it immediately, so they can spam your comments, so they can try to break into your site if you don't keep your updates current.

Lots of people say that you should target low competition keywords because the competition there is less.   In a general way that is true.

However, I have found that it is a mistake to fear your competition and instead of targeting third- and fourth-class keywords go ahead and attack volume.  Why? Because where there is volume there is usually a lot of search and where there is a lot of search there is usually money to be made.... and if you attack with unique content you will automatically get your site in position for a lot of low-volume long-tail keywords that are easy to rank for.

So in my opinion, it is a mistake to target something that nobody is searching for... I mean that is a fantastic way to waste a lot of time.