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If you go for the short win the long win becomes more difficult because you fortified their position.

Right now you are getting sales traffic from that page.  I'll bet some of the people who find that page are looking for information.  So, make some great content that is informative about same subject and buy a second ad on that page.

Then on that informative page have house ads for your sales pages.

Why link to them?  Just beat them.

If half of my biz was coming from an ad page on another domain that is slipping... and I was running an authority site in the niche.....   I would be producing some fantastic content on that same topic for my own site.   I'd be willing to put a lot of time and money into that content.

I would be trying to kick their butts.

The higher the quality of content the easier the linkbuilding.

Having content that, in addition to being high quality, is of very high interest can also be important.

If you have that type of content on your site and one of your visitors shares it on facebook (or another sharing site) that can start a flood of traffic to your site.

Start here for general advice....

http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=linkbuilding

The most effective advice is site specific.  If you have a lot of great content you can attract links.  If you don't have a lot of great content then you have to connive links.   The type of content and the topic area also are variables that change the linkbuilding methods.

Thanks Mike.  That answers my question above.  There is a way to trick the server.

I never even think about KW density.  I just write in natural language.  Sometimes that produces a lot of keyword instances in my writing, sometimes it doesn't.

I think that it is hard enough to write great content without having the additional burden of stuffing or subtracting some special words into the content. What a PITA.

Google doesn't want people doing that.  Save yourself some time and just write like a human.  That's what I do and my stuff ranks fine.

I don't know the answer to this... just askin' in case a smart person knows.

Would there be any problem with using .htacess to get rid of the unwanted directory name... for example just 301 redirect everything from www.domain.com/blog/post/post-name to www.domain.com/post/post-name ?

I think that this would work since all of the action is on the server.

I think that domain authority is something that you might check (for your own sites) about once every six months  and feel good if the number is going up.

I think that looking at the domain authority of potential competitors might be a useful thing to do if you are considering a new area of competition and want to get some idea about how much mojo is over there.

But, really... its kind of like picking up a box and guessing the weight.   Its about that kind of accuracy.  That kind of metric has value but I don't think that it is a good use of your time to be checking it, plotting it, worrying about it.

Spend time working on your website to make it a lot better and domain authority will take care of itself.  I can't tell you the DA of my sites.  I look at it as stated above.

Here is the SEOmoz explanation for domain authority.  You can read it and speculate.

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority

Anyone who answers is speculating.

Yes, I am starting to read any of his posts that I see.

No one has really even mentioned what i should look for.

What you should look for depends upon your website and the industry and people you are trying to reach.

Before you spend any time promoting your site it should be an excellent resource for someone.  If you don't have than then the first job you need to do is create a good website.

Once you have that resource the place to promote it is to people who are interested.  You target for success.

Yes.

That proposal is low value to dangerous in my opinion.

You asked for a review.  That's what I think.

"we spin and post to 700 PR1 to PR5 blogs."

That is how you get in trouble.  This is trash.

That package isn't going to get you into the top ten either.

I would rather spend $250 on a great article for my website, an inexpensive digital camera to take photos for my website or a new deluxe coffee machine for my office.

I would not use any of the services that were offered to you.

None.  Most of them are spam, useless or even dangerous in my opinion.

Spend the money to improve your website.

Do you have click location screenshots for some of your most important pages as created by CrazyEgg or Clicky?

If you don't have that then you can put a few pages of the old design back up with these services running to see what links on your old design engaged visitors.  This is not an ideal solution but might tell you what your current site lacks that previous site had.

It did not look at your page because my visitors always behave in ways that surprise me.   Instead of going with my own guesses, I try to learn what works with the visitor.

I think that you are making major improvements in your content.  That should bring you long-tail keywords and help you avoid panda problems.

I am taking a different approach on my sites.  For example, you have category pages with lots of paragraph text and not much written for each product an no buy buttons  Instead of that I have no paragraphs above or below my products, however, each of my products has a two-to three sentence mini-description and a buy button.  I also do not paginate my category pages.  All of the products are on those pages.  I might paginate if I had several dozen products... but if I have 50 or fewer I don't paginate.

I believe that makes a richer page for search, a page with more word diversity to pull long tail traffic, customers don't have to click through pages, they can buy quickly if they don't need more information, it makes a site with fewer pages and I believe that a compact site competes better than a site with a lot of pages.

Most of my product pages have a very large photo at the top of the page with description below and links to pages where "how to use" "how to select" "how to maintain" information can be found.  Often a video.  These have increased conversions and the informative pages rank very well in the SERPs.

This page has a nice improvement in content depth.

http://www.tacticalbootstore.com/belleville-boots-m-74.html

One thing that you might consider is how that new content pushes your boot selection down the page.  Maybe only the most essential above the boots and the rest below.

The new product pages look good too.  Just be sure that they are all absolutely unique.

This hard work should pay,   Keep at it.

Yep... I agree... we get thousands of visitors every day through category pages.

Use your title tag to steal clicks away from them.

offer free beer

tell them you have Secrets

shout a kickass price or free delivery

make your title tag so much more interesting and enticing than theirs.

If you use this for a google query you will see that you internal pages are in the index.

site:wsinetpower.com

If you ask me the title tags are ineffective and spammy.... maybe that is why you are not getting much traffic.

Try writing title tags that read like natural English language and that are limited in length to about 60 characters.  Do some keyword research so that the title tags target the people you want to reach and can serve.

You can learn how these metrics are calculated using the links at the bottom of this post.

In short they are link metrics.

They are not a direct measure of content quality or user engagement.

I believe that a person should be working to improve his website to increase:

-- the amount of time that visitors spend

-- the CTR of your listing in the SERPs

-- the number of people who share your content

-- the number of people who ask for your site by name by typing your domain into a search box or typing it into a chrome address bar

-- the number of times people mention your domain - even if there is no link

The things above are based upon the quality of your content and google can detect them and measure them.  I think that a lot more  than links drive SERPs.

If I was google I would stop using links and use the measures above.

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/moztrust

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority

Use the SEOmoz metrics to track your link profile over time and to get a gross comparison against other websites.

The most important thing that you can do is to improve your website.

In your topic area or industry what is the most valuable content that you could produce that would be appreciated by your target audience?   If you can identify that and produce best-on-the-web information that is helpful and useful and easy-to-understand then that is the best thing that you can do.

Best-On-The-Web

This type of content is liked, tweeted, linked to, emailed, bookmarked and shared.  That type of activity will bring more people to your site who will like, tweet, email, link, bookmark and share.  This activity can improve your rankings and also improve your metrics.

You can hasten that process by promoting your content so that a larger number of people see it - especially to the people in your topic area or industry who have a voice or who are active in reporting and sharing.

The SEOmoz metrics are a good way to get a numerical gauge of your progress over time.  They can also be used as a way to compare the relative mojo of your site against others.

So, instead of looking to them to light the way to success, you should instead be making a big "to do list" of jobs that will improve your site, getting them done and helping other people discover what you have created.

One of the greatest problems that people have in doing this is that they produce yada yada yada content instead of best-on-the-web in their niche.  So if your content is not making people say WOW!  then it is time to kick up the quality.

Pedestrian content does not get shared.  You need WOW! content for that to happen.  Even if your site is about something as mundane as manure it is still possible to create content that will attract attention and be shared.

Most of the content on my site is articles that are 500 to 5000 words and one to ten photos - all on a single page.

It was very easy for me to "noindex" the republished content and "noindex" the blog posts that were very short.

For a site that consists of pages where most of the content is thin and duplicated a massive rewriting job is required in my opinion.  That is what I would do if I wanted to make an attempt at recovering such a site.

I had to chop off my foot to save my ass.

The academic year is coming to a close in the northern hemisphere.  Hire a music scholar who is also a great writer and attack this.  Or hire a writer who appreciates music.  Better yet, hire one of each.

It is time to exert yourself.

When I say that my site has about a million of these links that is not an exaggeration.

My rankings are great.  If I decided to do something about these links I could spend tens of thousands of dollars fighting a problem that does not exist.

I'll wait until they prove to be a problem.

**If he's getting traffic from SEs on the wrong topic, the benefits of solving a few of the more authoritative back links would be worth the time. **

I'd enjoy that traffic and try to monetize it.  I doubt that these links are causing any rankings that are unrelated.

I don't enjoy these links pointing at my site.... but I don't think that it is a good use of my time trying to chase down invisible people in another hemisphere who are probably behind the links and would not take them down if I could get in touch with them.

Every website with any amount of traffic and spider action will pick up unrelated links.

Some of them are from blackhats, some are from scrapers, some from people building some type of conglomerated site, some even from university experiments.

One of my sites has about a million of these links.

I don't worry about them.  I rarely even look at my links because these are so numerous I have a hard time finding the good ones.

You have a great domain, looks like you have a fantastic website.  I would not worry about this for a minute.

I worship at the same alter..

heh... I saw you Yelping for sushi this morning.

When you have a Panda problem it can damage rankings across your site.

I had a Panda problem with two sites.

One had some republished content and some very short blog posts.   Rankings went down for the entire site.  I noindexed them and the rankings came back in a few weeks.

The other site had hundreds of printable .pdfs that contained only an image and a few words.  These were images using the .pdf format to control the scale of the printer.  Rankings went down for the entire site.  I noindexed the .pdfs and rankings came back in a few weeks.

In my opinion, your site needs a huge writing job.

Why do people worship SEOmoz metrics and are willing to move Heaven and Earth to improve them?

They don't determine your rankings and nobody is going to pay you for getting a good score.

There is more talk in Q&A about improving metrics than there is about improving websites.

Sometimes I think that these metrics are a decoy that keeps people from building a great website.

I agree with Marie.  The content is duplicate AND the content is very thin.  Both of the Panda problems on every page.

A complete authorship job is needed.

Every page needs to be 100% unique and substantive.

Comments that appear on some pages are the only content that I saw that I would consider as unique.

If I owned this site and was willing to make a big investment I would deindex everything and start rewriting with the best products first.

I believe that penalties on internal anchor text are BS.

Plastic Flower Pots for the house and garden with free delivery

Is more UX friendly then Plastic Flower Pots - Free Delivery!.

I would use what you propose only if I thought that adding the word "house" or "garden" was going to increase the keyword reach of the optimization.  I would not add them unless I had keyword frequency that convinces me that they will qualify the page for a much larger number of queries.

People do not "read" the SERPs.  They "scan" the SERPs.

For that reason I believe that

**Plastic Flower Pots - Free Delivery!  **

will be read and understood by more people.  The free delivery is not lost ad the end of the title tag.

I also believe that this shorter title tag is stronger optimization.

Why doesn't Google head more in the direction of descriptive titles rather then shorter the better?

IMO, shorter is better for the searcher and for google.

Which of these slaps the scanning searcher's face with the product and free delivery?

Plastic Flower Pots for the house and garden with free delivery

****Plastic Flower Pots - Free Delivery!  ****

I believe that "free delivery" is lost in the longer version.

If  I thought that a link from the product page to the blog would be helpful for the visitors I would have no hesitation to provide it.

Lots of my product pages have a link to an article with anchor text like this.  "How we use the SEOmoz Blender"  or..  "Video: How we use the SEOmoz Blender"

These have significantly increased conversion rates.  I don't care what the search engines think.

If you have a really good article that you think will help visitors make a decision about your product or help them enjoy it I am betting everything that will make you a stronger brand than any teeny tiny advantage that a link on the page or its anchor text will subtract.  In fact, I am willing to bet that those back-and-forth links with optimization improve your search visibility because it shows you have deeper content than the guy who has not written this content..  That will earn tweets, likes, links, sales.

Lots of mine have double listings in the SERPs.   Then I pull traffic for people who are looking for a product page AND people who are looking for information.

This is not deoptimization or cannibalization.  It is kicking ass.

I would use this.....

Plastic Flower Pots - Free Delivery!

It gives you both "flower pots" and "plastic flower pots" as exact matches in a very short tag.

"Free delivery" shouts a value proposition and elicits clicks.

This title tag is short, very clear, easy  to understand.

If my brand is visible and easy to recognize in the URL I would not repeat it in the title tag.

I don't have a site map on any of my sites.  Never any problem getting indexed or ranking.  None.

I think that wordpress does just as well in the SERPs as a page published on any other platform.  I don't think that it has any magic bullets that can't be done on even a hand-built format such as DreamWeaver.

I think that the more important part of SEO is the selection of topics and categories, the composition of title tags, and the linkage structure of the website.  The most important part is getting quality content and pitching in a way that will make your visitors respond.  Although some might not think that is SEO, it can have a greater impact than a lot of off-page work.

“as you (kn)no(w) google loves WP and will get listed quicker as 80 to 90% of your SEO is already done”

This is probably true if you don't know much about SEO.

Any recommendations?

If this was my site I would not worry about it.

What I've always been taught is that these methods are out and they could actually harm you - yet I haven't seen this happen to my competitors.

Don't modify a good plan of attack because you see others doing something that you know will cause problems.

Hang in there.  Work harder.

If these guys are beating you then it might be a good idea to get a site review to see if there is anything that you are doing that is holding you back or anything that you could be doing that will increase your effectiveness.  It is never a bad time to reassess your methods.

and become a more relevant source

I think that you have optimized your pages beyond the point of relevance.

"Greenside Lawncare offers the following services: St. Charles Lawn Care, St. Peters Lawn Care, O’Fallon Lawn Care, Lake St. Louis Lawn Care, Wentzville Lawn Care, Chesterfield Lawn Care, and Maryland Heights Lawn Care."

If you rewrite in natural language your rankings might go up and your visitors might respond better to your website.

They know you are in the lawn care biz.

I don't know what keyword you are targeting but I will say that there are many that I would not attempt because I don't have the resources to compete.

However, I very often have attacked a difficult term, never achieved it, but dominated nearly all of the longtail - enough that it was very worthwhile.

I like media/s suggestion to attack multiple keywords.

Your first step is to understand ... "What is Panda?".  "What is Penguin?"

Go learn that, be able to explain it exceptionally well, then come back here and ask questions.

You need to understand the basics before you can fix another person's website.

I find lots of dupe content too.

Instead of building 30 sites I would focus on one, filling it full of high quality, original, substantive content.

Actually, I don't think that I would make a travel site like these because I don't have the resources to compete and the ability to produce fantastic content for cities around the world.

Lots of people see the sites of an industry ranking well in the search results.  Then when they try to make their own site or a clients they discover that they can't rank.  That's because they have zero authority and no power.

it is worth it or better stop this project and focus on 1 product oriented website ?

That is what I would be doing.

is affiliate marketing dead in 2013 now?

AM has been really hard for several years unless you have a heavyweight site.  You can no longer toss up a site with grabbed content - or even original content and get traction in an industry as competitive as travel.

or my writers

heh... you gotta keep an eye on these guys.

Am I right in thinking the most important link building factor is the number of unique linking root domains?

One link from the Pope's site will be worth 10,000 links from spam blogs.

Multiple links from a domain won't help me so much?

Again, it depends upon the domain.   But, if you have multiple links from a very high quality site it will benefit you more than one link from that site.  And, if those links hit multiple pages on your site then each of those pages will get measurable benefit... and that benefit, I believe, will flow through your entire site.

We're a news media site,

This is some of the most volatile stuff on the web.

Really... if you have concerns and don't know what's going on it would be best to hire a pro to review the site instead of chasing shots in the dark from people who have never seen the site.

Your effort and theirs could be divining for a problem that does not exist.

These dentists seem to be satisfied with pedestrian content on a generic website.  They probably rank OK in local search if they are competing in Soldotna or Bugtussle and have someone who knows how to work local.

If they face stiffer competition, especially in organic SERPs, then they will probably not compete very well.

If I was a dentist I would want my own content and photos on the site.... just because.

You got solid advice from jamesscaggs.

Build the blog on the primary domain.  Building a blog on another domain to "manufacture links" is something that has not worked with Google for several years - if it even worked well then.

If this was my site, clicking on the image would deliver the visitor to a new page and that page would have the photo and a LOT of information about it.  There  is a lot to say about these photos that will demonstrate expertise, educate customers and provide huge long tail keyword pull from search.

Give your install guys a voice to text recorder and have they speak and preach about everyone of these photos.  Then make it into content.

I think that this site has lots of fancy design, lots of fantastic photos... emphasis on design rather than on search engine attack and substantive content.

You could kick the results up a lot by making multiple page gallery targeting terms like solar install on a flat roof, solar on pitched roof, rooftop water heating.  Instead it is on one page with title tag of "portfolio".

Use these photos and the gallery to be in every SERP that anybody lands on in your target market.

You could be making the best-on-the-web solar install linkbait.

so i am just wondering what the difference is from here to paid editorial. Just wondering how google would know the difference.

Yes, you might have even paid these authors and simply give a link to their website and blog so interested people can find them easily.