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What would you do if a competitor had their main domain, and then another domain targeting your local area with the same exact content?

This would not bother me at all.

I have seen it a lot over the past ten years.  Watching these competitors for that long tells me that duplicate sites usually do not exist on the first page of google for a long time - at least not where there is any serious competition.  One of them usually disappears.

What can you do?  I would hope that competitor builds identical domain #3.

I do not believe that there is a connection between organic SERPs ranking and your Adwords quality score.

1. The lose of equity to those unwanted 'style A' pages - I think a series of careful planned 301s will be the solution.

If you redirect the discarded pages you might have a gain in equity.

2. Possible loss of long tail traffic to the individual products which might not be caught by one individual page per style.

Actually, with lots more words on a page you might have a gain in long tail traffic.  The only way to know is to try it... just saying this because it might not be a loss.

More important, you might be moving away from a potential duplicate content problem as these pages might be very similar.

3. Internal link structure will need to be monitored to make sure that we're still highlight the most important pages as well, important.

This job is always present.

Google is always running experiments and you might be seeing some of them.  Also, Google has old data and new data and you might be seeing a little of each.

They have thousands of servers responding to search results and they don't all use the same data.

It sounds like you are thinking like this..... "Man, it is really hard to get links from other websites.  I just build a blog and use it to give links to my site."

The links from a blog will not pass value unless it gets links from other websites.  Then most of that value will be stuck in the blog and only a tiny amount will pass out through the links that you have to your main site.

So, if you really want to support your main site, publish the blog in a folder on the main site and fill with highly linkable content, fantastic content... then every link that hits the blog will count for the link popularity and domain popularity of your main site.

With great content the blog can be a fantastic asset on your site.  In addition to attracting links it can be a showcase of your expertise and a reference for your visitors.

Now about the .org.... it will have the same weight as a .com.  Google treats all types of domains equally.

WordPress produces similar long URLs that match the post title.

How much will it help? Very little, except where competition is very lo.

Will Google ferret it out? I doubt it.

I think that there are two potential problems: 1) duplicate content (which can get your pages filtered from the search results), and, 2) trivial content which can be bitten by panda)

I would not worry much about this content unless you have hundreds or thousands of pages of it.

I would check analytics to see if these pages pull any traffic from search. If not then I would merge them onto long pages instead of on separate pages - or I would block them from indexing by robots txt.

You are operating under the assumption that people are using those footer links.

Run a program like CrazyEgg to see if anyone is clicking those links.

I bet nobody clicks them.

We spend all of our effort writing articles for our own site.  We never give them away.  Far too valuable to give them away - and as we see here the promise of links is hollow.

I am willing to bet that the root issue is with the host and one of these situations is occurring:  A) the host is throttling your processor resources and shutting your domain down after unusual activity occurs on your site.... B) total activity on the server (your site and other sites) exceed a certain level and the server limits resource available for processing.

I would be looking for a new host.

Wait.... your question is so extreme that I must answer in a realistic way...

Apple is never, ever, ever going to link to every computer website.  Some of them are not relevant enough to content on Apple's website. Some of them are not good enough for Apple to give them a link. Some computer websites are blackhat.

The day that Apple starts linking to everything everywhere is the day that their links are worthless.  Keep that in mind when you start linking out. Keep that in mind when you evaluate the value of a link coming to you.

Link only to relevance.  Link only to quality.  Link only to good sites.  If you do that you will have a great site.

You keep looking for a "limit".  The limit isn't a number.  The limits are relevance, quality and virtue.

...general consensis regarding the amount of outbound links...

Just go out and look at other sites.  Most of them do not link out freely.  They worry about giving away linkjuice, they worry about helping competitors, they worry about losing traffic, they worry about damaging their income.

if there is a correlation between the more you have going out, the more damage you can do to your domain.

If there was a problem with linking out then wikipedia would not rank for anything.

The web is all about linking and I highly doubt that google would penalize sites for doing it.  In fact, which would you rank higher... a kickass article with no external links or the identical kickass article that links out to all of the most important information on the web about related topics?  Which would you value if you were a searcher?

Link out freely and links will flow back to you.

is a site with good domain authority better to keep the short leash on handing out links to external sites?

You don't need to keep a leash on the links what you need to watch out for is linking to trash.  I you are linking only to site that are better than your own then I am betting that you will be rewarded with links, likes, domain queries, rankings and more.

Run adwords and bid high enough to get an impression on every pageview.

That gives you an opportunity to get numbers and test traffic.

I am wondering if client cross referencing is wise when blogging. For example linking client blogs to each other, linking my own blog to the clients blog etc...

This sounds 100% manipulative.

I believe that the people who get the best return out of blogging develop a message that they want to spread and pursue that with enthusiasm and verve.

Perhaps you should set up a blog for each client and help them develop a mission of education, entertainment or sharing for people in their business niche.

There are other options.  For example they could post your article and then use the rel="author" and rel="me" to attribute the content to you.  Also, rel="canonical" might work. I have not used these so I can't give implementation advice.

You would have to get an agreement that makes placing those attributes on their website is a condition of content use.

When people ask me to use my content, I invite them to link to it as you suggest.  I don't give my content away. Far to valuable.

A few of my competitors give me content because they want to have visibility in front of my traffic.  These competitors have a message to share rather than something to sell.  They also get some traffic from my site. These are competitors who are not "gunning to beat me" but just looking for as much visibility as possible.

Any Ideas on how to to receive more LIkes and Shares.

First, make content that everybody everywhere will want to "like" and "share" with all of their friends.

Next, make it very easy for them to like or share your content buy using addthis.com buttons or other social sharing tools.

What should I be looking at in our Account to see where we are throwing money out the window?

Focus first on quality score.  If you do not have a QS of at least seven you are burning money.  If you have a seven then you should be working to get higher.

After you have a higher quality score then is the time to work on other things.  Which other things depends upon you products, your competitors and your profit margins.  Hard to tell without detailed study.  Adwords is difficult and bid management is a mathematical game.

You might have a very smart competitor.

If that competitor has a website that is more powerful than yours then it is probable that they will rank higher in the SERPs than the original document on your website.  Also, it is very possible that the article on your website will be filtered from the SERPs because of duplicate content.

How will you feel when your great articles start earning links that power your competitor's website?  How will you feel when they outrank you?

I don't give content away.  It feeds existing competitors and creates new ones.  However, some people are so hungry or so desperate for a link that they will give their content away.

Also, content is my offensive weapon.  It competes in the SERPs, it competes for links, and those account for most of my traffic.

It's great news that you are getting 75 to 80 posts per week with a lot of it being very well written.

Will this hurt your site if the posts link back to a site where a verbatim copy exists?  In my opinion you have three risks.... 1) linking to websites that are being heavily manipulated - a bad neighborhood.... .... 2) seeing your copy of the post filtered from the search engines because of duplicate content... and ..... 3) seeing your site or a client site be punished by panda for content farming.

Here is what I would do...  1) Encourage all of your clients to post high quality original content.  Preach a strong sermon to them about the value.

2. Limit the number of links within your site that lead to low quality content or content that is heavily syndicated.

3. Develop a "library" on your site of very high quality, original, non-syndicated content and strongly encourage your clients to submit items for consideration.  Be strict with the rules.  However, any article accepted would be featured on your homepage, linked to from one of several highly visible category pages on your site that are featured in your persistent navigation.  Turn your content resource into a highly promoted asset.  Create a situation where clients will highly desire the premium attention.

I have two philosophies that are rather contrarian.....

1. Instead of paying attention to the KW difficulty number, go out to the SERPs and look at the content of the top ten websites.  If you can beat their content then attack with everything that you got.  Great content, given a little visibility, will defeat SEO over time.

2. Do not fear competition, because where there is heavy competition there also usually heavy traffic and where there is heavy traffic there is also lots of money changing hands.  Attack heavy competition with high quality content that is long and engaging... and that will attract links and pull traffic on long-tail queries.

What I would do with them depends upon their quality.

If they are best-on-the-web for their topic I would post on my own site and recruit links into them.

If they are less than best-on-the-web for their topic I would improve them.

If they are really bad I would offer them to a competitor.

So much for Google saying it's going to turn down the meter on exact match domains because that's all I see this website, if you want to call it that, has going for it.

This is their reward for grabbing a good domain.  Maybe you should buy it from them?

If I was a client and the service provider gave me a bunch of numbers I would not be too impressed.

The thing that would get my attention is something ringing.

That could be my telephone or my cash register.

How can you make something ring? That will make you an unquestionable success.

The thing is, mysite.com/potatoes actually has a great page authority (3475 links from 145 domains) so I really don't wan to lose all that juice...

Dude, are you sure that you want to dump these??...   You are almost the King of Potatoes

If this was my site I would be hesitant about dumping these pages with tons of links.  I would do analytics to see how much traffic they are bringing and also using adsense channels (or other channeling) determine how much money they are making.  You might want to post once a month on this topic.  You can always keep these pages and use lots of nice thumbnail images of tomatoes to lure visitors over to your tomato pages. And reduce the number of links on your site that lead visitors to the potato pages. That big collection of tomato links will also pump some of the linkjuice over to your tomato pages.  Not as good as a redirect but still preserves the linkvalue that contributes to the authority of your domain.

I republish article content from other websites.  This is always done with permission and often the other sites ask me to do it because they have a message that they want to place in front of my visitors.   I value this content because my visitors consume it.

Unfortunately these pages do not perform well in search even though I optimize them so that they do not directly compete for the same keywords as the origins.  Why? There are usually several other sites with the same content. And they compete with each other in the SERPs and share the search traffic.

I incur labor costs in posting the content and acquiring nice images to make it look good on my site.  Sometimes these are not fully recovered because of their reduced traffic.  Also, these pages have a linkjuice flow into them that might be more valuable if sent to other pages.

I view these as costs to serve my visitors and the industry niche of my site.

One other risk is the duplicate content.  Perhaps updates like the Panda update would reduce rankings of sites that contain lots of duplicate content.  I have not seen that yet in my niche.  The quality of the content is some of the highest on the web and the sites that republish it are almost all authoritative.

If I thought that there was any penalty or bad odor on the old site I would not risk it. However I would reuse content and try to get the URLs changed on existing valuable links. Just an opinion.

Overwhelming link strength.

The easier it is to obtain a link the lower it's value. Great links are like the Marine Corps Officer's Sword.... "Earned. Never given."

You seem to be focused on those spammy links and I can understand that.  They are disturbing.  However, before I would blame them for the problem I would want answers to these....

1. is there any problem with the update of your site... were there URL changes, dynamic content assembly, java links in your persistent navigation?

2. the new content that you produced... has it been grabbed by others and posted on their sites... Search for unique sentences in quotes

3. the whitehat links that you obtained... did you have to give any links back to obtain them... are they paid or links that could have been devalued?

For me the spammy links rate my attention only after the potential problems above are ruled out.  Lots of sites have these types of links.  They are ubiquitous on the web and the sites that hold them usually do not persist for a long time.  I believe that duplicate content, linking back to other domains and design problems are more common causes of damage to rankings.

Also, consider that both Ryan and I suggest that the spammy links or the white hat links could have been helping for a short period of time before being devalued.

As for finding an available SEO, I would look for generous and competent contributors here and ask if they are available.

I believe that there are many ways to approach this.  However, the methods that will have the best results depends upon the amount of skill, time and expertise your business can put into content, into running the site and into promoting it. Add onto that the way that you hope that the site will work to acquire and deliver the leads.

I believe that quickly considered answers tossed out in a Q&A have a greater chance of missing the mark than hitting it.

My advice would be to hire a person to understand your business model, learn about the resources that you can put into the site and then come up with a plan that will deliver the best results.

Ten minute answers are wildly thrown darts.

I think that lots of people have given you very good and very generous advice here.

They were hosting Mozcon which probably exceeds an "all hands on deck" effort. If you have ever been involved with hosting something like that you know how hard they were working.

If you have a message to spread you should post it everywhere you can and get everyone everywhere to post it for you.

However, if you are making money in a specific niche and you distribute content for your topics it is possible that the content will be posted on sites that will outrank you.  And, if your content is really good and those sites post it then they will attract links that could have gone to you.

Those are some of the reasons why I never give content in my topic areas away.  You can do whatever you want.

Most websites that become highly ranked in their niche accumulate a lot of links from spammy domains.  My sites have lots of them too.  I didn't place them, I can't control them and I don't worry about them.

There are many factors in your question that could relate to your rankings drop.... 1) site was updated, 2) big backlink campaign, 3) added lots of content, 4) one thousand spammy links.  Any one of them could be the cause of this drop.

The updated site might have a crawl, indexing or some other problem.... the backlinks you acquired might not be as good as you think.... the content that you uploaded might be duplicated elsewhere or have been spun for other sites... and those spammy links could be the problem.

If you are confident about your updated site, the quality of the backlinks and the uniqueness of your content then my bet would be placed here..... that the 1000 spammy links that were quickly acquired actually helped your rankings temporarily and then were devalued.

If you have any doubts that you can't answer yourself about the first three factors you might get a pro to look at them carefully for you.

My memory is actually very bad.... but subjects like concrete pumps and expanded aggregate get my attention.

Any ideas about my original questions?

No, I don't think that you will ever be comfortable with hosting a hundred sites linking back to you.   At least not without getting 100 different accounts on 100 different services.

If Google is going to see this as a hundred websites with footer links pointing back at your site then I don't think that it makes much difference if those sites are on one server or a hundred.

I think that the best solution is a different method of linkbuilding.

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Now, revisiting the original question.... if you imagine that each of these websites has a special page.... "These are the people who have helped us"... and on that page they have an entire paragraph for five to ten people, organizations and companies who have been key in their development. That paragraph details what each has done and links to them by domain.  I think that would be a lot more valuable than a footer link at bottom of page.

If you post great content about concrete pumps on ezine I would be tempted to grab it and post it on my own site.

The problem with that for you is.... that would immediately give me pages that would overnight be ranking in your SERPs - above your site I bet.

Giving your content away feeds existing competitors and creates new ones.

The only content that I would give away is something so horrible I would like to see it on my competitor's site. 

Lots of people will disagree with me.  I am comfortable with that.

You have lots of great content?  Post it on your own site.

Maybe you wrote the content suggested here....

http://www.seomoz.org/q/any-suggestions

If you place content like that on your site let me know about it.  I'll bet you get a few links.

Lots of people complain about Google Adwords KW Tool... but I think that lots of those complaining don't understand it thoroughly - especially broad match, exact match, etc....

I think that the tool gives good data.  Because so many people use it for bidding it is in Google's best interest to give as good of data as they can.

Now... projecting that data to other search engines is probably not going to be that accurate because different types of people use those engines and their SERPs are designed differently from google.

3000 unique articles which i have payed well over 10 000usd

Maybe you didn't pay enough to get good articles that are genuinely original and not spun.

I believe that the answer depends upon two things....  1) the goal that you have for this content... and ... 2) the quality of content your writer is producing.

A) If your goal is to spread a message then you should syndicate like mad giving the content, publishing the content and promoting the content  to everybody everywhere who is willing to share it or distribute it.

B) If your goal is to get some links then what you do depends upon the quality of your content.

i) if the quality of your content is "best-on-the-web" in your niche then post it on your own website only and promote in channels that do not require you to give the entire content away.  These include stumble upon, reddit, slashdot, digg, twitter, facebook and more.

ii) if the quality of your content is less than "best-on-the-web" then improve it and do the above

iii) if the quality of your content is really bad then the best thing you can do is give it to your competitor to post on his site

Run adwords on the keyword, location, matchtype that you are interested in.  That will give you real data on the search volume and you can find out if the traffic converts.  Bid high enough to make the first page.

I have a site that gets 2000 to 3000 posts per year of temporary content - these are very short posts.  The content is great for a few months but then the value is lost.  Each year we delete 2000-3000 pages of this content.

Before we delete we look at analytics to see if any of these pages are pulling traffic.  If there are pages pulling traffic we 301 redirect those pages to relevant pages of evergreen content or create new pages for the redirect. After that all remaining URLs are 301 redirected to the homepage of the blog.

Some of these pages might have a few links.  The redirects conserve them.

To make this easy the posts are foldered by year /blog/2009/    /blog/2010/   /blog/2011/   etc.

1. How can I gain on the domain authority front? (more diverse links?)

I believe that the authority of your domain is more determined by who is linking to YOU rather than if you are linking to a few blogs in the sidebar.

2. Should I no-follow the links on their blog so they don't have hundreds of pages with the same links (most internal) on there site

Why not just remove those links from the sidebar of the post and category pages.  They would still display on the blog homepage but not on the many pages inside.  If you have wordpress this can be done by defining an alternative sidebar for those pages.

Most things they mention in the video is quite contradictory to everything SEOmoz teaches about link building.  I think that this is an answer.

Prepare your powerpoint slides as usual.  Be sure to add a few links to related pages on your website (backlinks from powerpoint presentations will display in your google webmaster tools).  And, be sure to include lots of keyword relevant text.

The most important thing to do is edit the "properties" of the file.  This will allow to give the presentation a title that will be used similar to a title tag by the search engines.

Decide what topic you can blog about.  If you want to blog about widgets then go out there looking for widget blogs.

I believe that the SEO strategy begins with obtaining an understanding of the business and identifying how they might succeed on the web.  This would include information about their products, their ability to produce content and the resources that they can put into the site.