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If you were google and you had a choice between two pages... one with 50 words and one with a few hundred. Which would you think is higher quality?
We have pages with short content on our site.... but we are working to improve them. When we improve a page from 50 words to a few hundred words that usually results in two things... 1) a ranking increase... and, 2) a lot more long tail traffic from the greater diversity of words on the page.
Time well spent.
Sure... 100 words... that's probably "good enough".... but in a competitive space don't you want "kickass"?
If I have a lot of content I publish it as soon as I can. Content in the index is as good as money. Why wait? Cash in!
They were laughing last week because I yelled the F word at some weasel who called me on the phone.
I am usually a nice and helpful person but when someone interrupts me, tries to use me and doesn't take "no" gracefully, I get really mad.
Get to the point FAST with WIFM.
One sentence of yada yada yada text and I hit "mark as spam" or ban all future emails from your domain from my inbox.
If I don't reply to your email don't call me on the phone... I will not be nice to you and you will hear my employees laughing in the background.
Here is a "best practices" page on the AddThis site....
https://www.addthis.com/help/best-practices
They recommend "top of the page" and recommend against "below the fold".
I look at "who" and "what" is above me.
Let's say that you rank #3 and two very informative pages on Google.com are above you then you need a great title tag to compete with them for the click. You might never beat them for this query so figure out a title tag that will pull away their visitors.
Let's say that you rank #3 and two decent articles on decent domains are above you... Beating their links will probably be difficult... but if you beat their content then you might have a chance.
I look at "who" and "what" is above me.
Let's say that you rank #3 and two very informative pages on Google.com are above you then you need a great title tag to compete with them for the click. You might never beat them for this query so figure out a title tag that will pull away their visitors.
Let's say that you rank #3 and two decent articles on decent domains are above you... Beating their links will probably be difficult... but if you beat their content then you might have a chance.
How can blogs that do not blog be considered high enough value by Google to rank in the top 5?
How can sites that just return 404 or 500 for ALL their pages be even considered a site let alone rank 2nd.
You can work really hard to get above them or you can wait for Google to devalue these pages.
Those are your choices.
But if google devalues those pages and drops them you will still be in position #9. I say that you still have a lot of work to do. .
Now.... Let's say that you rank #3 with the error page and stale page above you. I bet that you will be in good position because people who check #1 and #2 will be delighted when they find you at #3.
Start working to get #3.
I see stale blogs and error pages above me once in a while. I ask myself... "Does that stale blog have kickass content?"... if it does I respect it... and... "Does that site with the 404's have a lot of kickass links?" .... if it does then I worry that they will discover the problem and fix it - and I will have a real competitor.
Consider this approach.... Look at all of those sites above you and decide to create content for this KW that puts all of them to shame. Blow them out of the water with a great article, an interactive, a video, a cartoon, statistical analysis or better yet a big page with several of these. Toss that up, forget about it, don't even linkbuild, come back in a year to check. I bet you will be surprised with the results. (If you want faster results tell a couple of influential bloggers in your niche who regularly point to new content about what you have created - but that could pull in competitors.)
i have around 130 links going to the page where as a site which is much higher than me in google has only around 5 links.
It's not how many you have. It's their quality.
PeterM22 points to another good reason - there KW domain is exact match.
I used 301 redirects on everything using .htaccess.
I think that a lot of people share based upon first impressions.
Huffpost has the share (for the article) in the content at top left (they have shares for the domain at top and bottom of page).
CNN has the share at top and bottom of article.
Google blog has at top and bottom.
There are some sites that might have a good handle on how their visitors behave.
**Is there any SEO benefit in doing this? **
If the pages on this old Yahoo! Store have any links from outside your network of sites then the value of those links would pass to your new store.
Before abandoning, I would look at the traffic pattern of the site to see where you have traffic coming in. You might learn something useful.
We were also kind of penalized by Panda. Would this help us out at all
I doubt that it will help. If both of these domains have same content I would try to do a page-by-page redirect so that a page on the old site hits the dupe content page on the new site. This would only be valuable if the old site has some viable links..
You are out of luck. I doubt that there is anywhere to get this. If there was a lot of people would be talking about it - especially the linksellers and linkbuyers.
Your management team needs some education or they will be hounding you for this forever.
Management needs to know that PR has not been updated for a long time. They also need to know that they are dwelling on a worthless metric.
Tell them to put their nose into a metric such as profits that is really important.
Hopefully they will not doubt you about this.
I have tried several different styles....
--- the sleek share button at top of left navigation
--- the like-tweet-share buttons at the top of articles
--- and the big 32x32 buttons centered in the top of the page header
What has gotten the most action for me is the big 32x32 buttons centered in the header of the page.
We are using buttons for facebook, twitter, email, print, favorites and share. On retail sites where sharing numbers are low we are not showing the counts... but on an info site with really high traffic and healthy count numbers we display the counts.
I am really surprised that addthis does not have a "best practices" page on their site that shows the best ways to earn shares.
Toolbar PageRank has not been widely updated for at least a year.
I have articles with PR7 links hitting them since last June and they still have no green showing on the toolbar PageRank.
Moving your domain from .md to .com would temporarily knock your ToolBar PageRank down to zero and it would stay there until the next toolbar PageRank update.
Nobody knows when google will update the toolbar PageRank.
I would not be surprised if they stopped publishing it.
They know that SEOs obsess over their rankings too much... and if they updated it daily we would spend too much time looking at ranking reports and not enough time on our more important work. 
I like the way you are thinking... there are different approaches to linkbuilding.
I believe that different types of linkbuilding work differently for different types of websites, different types of people and different types of relationshiops.
One of the most important things to consider is the value of content on the site. If you have kickass content it can be easy to get links. Just share it via facebook, twitter, slashdot, reddit, stumble upon and the people who encounter it will pass it along to their friends/followers/ etc and some links will develop as a result. Invest in great content and your linkbuilding efforts will can be easy - but your content needs to be best-on-the-web superior stuff. Most people are unable or unwilling to produce this in quantity. This type of linkbuilding really scales because it takes no effort from you. Other people do it for you.
Once your content declines in value then you enter the "asking for links" and "building links" realms.... they are not "gifts" any more. Now you gotta work for almost every one of them, the links are not as juicy and the very best links are impossible to get. These types of links can be one-way if you have decent but not superior content. You just have to ask enough people and a few of them will link to you - as long as you have something respect able for them to link to - and you have to confine your asking to sites that are willing to link out.
Another category of links is "relationships" such as you are a member of a business group, a civic group, a tenant in a building and the landlord links to you, a donor to a library, a business in a specific town, a graduate from a school or department, or maybe your mom will link to you from her blog. These usually have nothing to do with your content and they will link to you as long as your site is not embarrassing.
Once your content and relationships decline in value to the point that nobody is really excited about you linkbuilding becomes a simple transaction...
There is a "fair trade" economy where I give you an article and you accept that content in exchange for allowing my links to remain in it.
There is a "favor economy" where you trade links, trade blog posts, etc. Nobody cares about your content they just want a link somewhere on your site.
Then comes the "purchase economy" where you pay people to link to your site.
I try to operate at the top of this list. I want to create assets on my site that people will link to because the transactions on the lower part of the list are very time consuming and expensive. The cost to scale is very high.
Keyword domains work best for exact matches. For example: BrassWidgets.com will get a ranking bonus for "brass widgets".
If you add another word like "RedBrassWidgets.com" you lose almost all of the ranking advantage for "Brass widgets"
Singular and plural make a big difference. Remember, they are best for exact match queries and as soon as you depart from that they really decline in ranking value - unless you earn the ranking by normal methods.
These are my opinions based upon owning a few keyword domains and competing with them for a very large number of queries.
I haven't done any scientific studies and I have not read anyone who is going to put numbers on these concepts.
I also agree.... but take a slightly different view....
You might also be rewarded with #1 and #2.
On a limited extent keyword cannibalization is an opportunity.
So, I don't have a problem with having two, sometimes three pages on one site that target the same keyword. If that keyword is a money-maker I want to hog two positions in the SERPs. There are a few keywords where I rank #1, #2, #3, #4 and each of those pages has a different appeal.
I like it and I bet my competitors don't.
One of my most important jobs as a webmaster is to get website visitors to do what I want them to do.
That's how you make money. 
(pig nose intentional)
If I have an opportunity to make money by getting them into a specific page then my job is to promote that page strongly. Of course, I want the visitor to be happy but my job is to make money.
I don't have any problem with promoting a money-making page twice (or three times!) on a single URL and there is no better place to promote my best stuff than on the homepage of the site.
The realistic side of me says there's nothing wrong with having and owning multiple domains
I agree. Nothing wrong with it. One guy is allowed to own ten toy stores on the same street in the same tiny town.
But they compete with one another.
For sales, for resources and for the owner's time. it's inefficient.
all your eggs in one basket.
I agree. My defense against that is a very high quality site. Much higher in quality than I would have if I was creating six sites in that same niche. I have the very best on that one site and it isn't doing manipulative linking with other sites that I own.
My diversity is in other sites - but in different related niches. So the sites don't compete with one another. I think that is superior to having six sites in the payday loan niche.
We have been able to increase the number of pages viewed by the average visitor by posting blocks of "recommended" "related" and "most popular" articles within and beside our content. These blocks each contain links to about six to eight related articles with an attractive thumbnail.
Visit sites like CNN and look at how they invite you to view more. Newspaper sites make money by getting you to view lots of pages... so they are usually good at offering more content options.
If people are bouncing that means they are only viewing one page.... put some options in their face in an attractive way.
Also, I don't know what your site looks like... making the design attractive, happy, credible and inviting is important to making visitors want to stay.
Do you use it,
No.
What you think about it?
I think that those links are worthless.
If you have original and valuable content then put it on your main site.
Bad.
Why build right in the cross-hairs of Google?
I would rather do almost anything else.
Does anyone have any tips on how to build up followed linking domains?
Create best-on-the-web content for the most popular topics in your industry niche, then promote them to the bloggers, professional associations and authority websites who cover that niche.
I agree... you might get a ton of SERP traffic for these. Your site might also show in the universal search results for that video.
I have a blog where I make very short posts of newsy content. I use lots of videos and often use the word "video" in the title tag. I think that it pulls people in from the SERPs.
I agree with your decision to get back into the hard business of earning links. IMO that is more important than your three questions.
**1. Ditching links in the nav.... **
Is anybody clicking those links and processing to cart? If nobody is doing that then I would ditch them - especially if those pages are not pulling organic SERP traffic.
2. Sub-cats....
I would try this and let sales be the deciding factor. It might have more impact there than in SEO.
3. Anything else...
This niche has become really really competitive since you launched this site. Everybody is working hard to eat your lunch. I agree with your analysis that linkbuilding is the urgent need.
It's akin to sending the post office a forwarding address when you haven't moved yet.
haha,... right... they will throw your mail away!
The best two days that I have ever spent was at Brad Geddes' Adwords Seminars. I've attended them twice and learned a ton both times.
Go there expecting to THINK HARD. I thought they were about as challenging as a college calculus class.. anybody who thinks that he is going to sit there, sip coffee and fart should stay home. This is really a math class of conversion rates, bidding strategies and profit margins. Spreadsheets! 
I don't like to build houses on other people's land.
So, I would post them on my own site where they can attract links, likes, tweets, etc. that point to a property that you own - which is also a property where you have better control over producing income.
You can spend your time cultivating a following on facebook or spend your time developing a following for your website. I am betting on my website.
I see a lot of value in FB and other social sites if you have a "message" to spread. My message is a means to earn a living and I think that I can do that best by building equity on my own site.
How much money are you making off of FB?
So, is a flat structure bad for SEO? I mean, it's the pages in the "bottom" of the site structure that are the most important ones...
Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. It depends upon a lot of factors, mostly the size of your site, your goals and the relative amounts of competition that your pages are up against.
Anybody who gives you an answer here is guessing. This is one of the most important strategy decisions that a webmaster can make and a good decision would require an evaluation of your site, keyword competitiveness research, plus information about your business.
On top of that the ideal structure of your site can change over time as it becomes more powerful or as your competitors become more powerful. New sites often do best with a narrow structure and then can go flatter and flatter as they gain power.
It would be best to hire someone who really knows link structure and competitive analysis if you want a good evaluation of this.
I would listen to your "SEO consultant expert".
Why would you put up a site map that sends Google to 1000 dead URLs? You want Google to believe you when you put up a sitemap.
Wow, that is a huge dropdown menu!
If the links in the drop down are crawlable then the result of this will be a very flat site architecture with your linkjuice spread widely across lots of pages. The opposite would be to have only a few links in your persistent navigation and the result of that would be to send lots of linkjuice into your main category pages or whichever pages you include in your persistent navigation.
My sites usually have a lot of links in the persistent navigation so having a huge number of links in the dropdown would not change the performance of my site. If your site competes against lots of low to moderately powered pages then this architecture might do well for you.
One concern that I have is with usability. How will the visitor know that there is an enormous navigation hidden in the drop down? This phonehouse site has an oversized navigation bar and that might help call attention to it... or you could use downarrows to signal that there are more links beneath.
I ran spider simulator on the phonehouse site and it looks like the links in that dropdown are crawled.
I agree with Dan. Let this go for a while to see what happens.
... more important.... before I went to tearing up the site I would go get more linkjuice.
You could also use AdWords for immediate and broad exposure.
I agree with Ryan. Improve the content. If you dip crap in chocolate, it is still crap.
I explained the answer to this in the second part of my original post.
The term "scraped content" is most often used for content that has been grabbed from your website by a visiting robot.
Based upon your posting, the duplicate content that you are talking about was intentionally distributed.
I would not place nofollow on the links for two reasons...... 1) pagerank that would have flowed into that link will evaporate with the nofollow (at least that is the latest word I've heard from google on this - although on this very issue they have had a tendency to change their mind without tellin').... 2) nofollow is often used for "we don't trust this".
How many links are you talking about... if just a few or a few dozen I would leave them as is. If you have a ton of links down there then maybe a different link structure would be useful... might consider that for other reasons as well. Not saying that what you have is bad.. just an opportunity to consider new things.
If I kept my category pages out of the search indexes I would be walking away from hundreds of search engine visitors per minute.
Do analytics to see how much traffic is coming into these pages from search, who is linking to them, how much revenue they earn and also consider their future traffic potential.
Its not good to follow generalized advice blindly.
I agree, potential students will likely be searching for specific degrees by academic field.
The page that is optimized for "online degrees" will be the page that high schools, businesses, other universities and education portals will be linking to most often. When these programs are marketed the marketing materials could invite links to this specific page.
I use something like this for shopping links....
Not saying that it is good or best or bad... just sayin'.
If we're not coming up first for our article, that means we are not believed to be the original author, correct?
Search engines can not identify original authors. (unless you use the rel="author" attribute and then they are merely taking your word for it) They only know which page with the content was discovered first. The content could have been on other pages first or the content could have been published first offline. Search engines don't have divine powers 
The page that ranks first in the SERPs is the one that has the best combination of relevance, domain authority and other ranking factors. Has nothing to do with authorship.
Should I remove all content from our site where this is happening, even though we actually did create these articles?
I would not do that if the content is valuable for your visitors, has acquired links from other sites or if the content is pulling traffic from search.
The take-away from this is not to give your content away if you want to rank for it in search. Giving it away can create strong competitors and feed existing competitors.
we hope the by-product is that the whole domain will start to rank better for "online degree".
I have a website that has a lot of content about a specific topic. As that site has gained content and links from other websites in that topic area I believe that the domain as a whole has gained ranking strength in that topic niche. I don't have a formal study to support this but I simply see that new pages seem to rank easily in that niche.
In your situation, your domain might gain strength for "online degree", however, it will still remain in competition with other educational websites who are doing the same thing. So unless you are becoming the gorilla in that niche I would not expect this alone to put you on the first page of Google for "online degree". You will have to earn that ranking by producing an optimized page for that term and through the force of domain authority and inbound links to that page.
will pages full of irrelevant keywords hurt the overall strategy?
No. Almost every site has this type of content. Think about all of the other stuff that exists on .edu domains.
Good luck with your work. I did the same thing a long time ago when online courses were very new (and search engines were very different)
If those keyword-rich footer links are pointing to other websites...
... oh... now, that's the list I want my competitor to be on... let's start a list!
Translation isn't my field of expertise... but if I was going to attack it I would want a free translation tool. However, I know that those are very expensive to produce.
Short of that, if I was ignorantly going to attack it I would got a large number of important documents that are relatively short but of interest to worldwide scholars. These might be documents such as the US Constitution or Declaration of Independence and translate them into various languages. Then I would offer these translated copies as .pdf documents to professors and institutions to place on their website. Each of these would have an attribution link or two in it that points to my website.
If this worked I would continue producing those documents and distributing them for free. You might also offer free or discount translation service to webmasters who would like to have a few important pages of their website in another language. Each of these would have an attribution link.
I would also study the backlinks of some competitors to see where they are coming from. Perhaps they have a strategy that you can employ.
Another method that I have done is to simply buy one of the top ranking websites. It can be a lot more economical than defeating them.
I think that you can only really appreciate a difficulty of 70% if you already have a site that is ranking at TopSERPs for a similar term.
If somebody came to me with a brand new site and wanted a #1 position for a 70% keyword I would know that there will be an awful lot of work going into it and that a #1 position might be impossible to obtain depending upon who is already there and who might launch after we begin.
This is not a KW that you will compete for at the $1000/month level.
