One quick opinion:

We have used a number of developers from eLance.com and have always been satisfied. As with any design project, the more information you are able to provide (in terms of what you want), the happier you will be with the finished product. Most designers will have a portfolio with samples of their previous work.

Prices will vary depending on the scope of the project, time frame, and how experienced/qualified the designer. You can get an idea of what people are paying for different projects by searching the job listings that other people have posted, and how much they are offering.

In our experience, eLance and similar sites are best when you know exactly what you want and the scope of the work is relatively small. Often times those developers are in different parts of the world and communication can be difficult (time zones, language barriers). For large, detail-intense projects, you might do better to find someone local or at least within the U.S. It might end up costing a bit more, but like Steve mentioned "you get what you pay for" and if you end up with a website that you don't like, the money you saved won't matter.

Sorry if I was unclear. My thinking was that a high bounce rate probably indicates that many visitors don't find the content relevant. If the inbound links you mentioned are bringing lots of traffic to your pages but people are just bouncing right off the site, the value of those links is greatly diminished. If this is the case, I don't think the pages are worth keeping. If people are actually staying on the site after landing on the page, then I would focus on improving those pages and not worry as much about how they find the pages.

We haven't totally solved this problem yet.  We removed the CSS that was hiding the links but otherwise left everything the same.  Only a few of the pages shows up in the first 50 Google results for its targeted keyword and none of the pages receives very much traffic. We are still considering whether it would be better to kill the pages and 301 redirect to something more relevant, or simply noindex the pages and leave them alone.

Our biggest concern is that many of these pages have a lot of links coming to them, although most of them are very low quality links.  I think are best approach is going to be trying to improve the pages that do have some rankings and eliminating the rest of the pages with 301 redirect.

I would also be interested to know what people think about this. We have an issue where a few years ago, an SEO firm produced a few dozen "articles" for our site which consisted entirely of keyword-stuffed junk with lots of hidden internal links to other relevant parts of the site. Each page has thousands of links to it from link farms and junk directories.

I suspect that there are actually many legitimate, reputable websites out there who suffer from this problem. Any website with many thousands of pages might very easily conceal the remnants of old, poorly-executed SEO efforts for years, particularly if the people making the SEO decisions are unaware of the difference between black hat/white hat practices. With the release of the farmer update, this could be a big problem.

For our situation, we wrestled with whether we should noindex the pages, remove them and implement a 301 redirect to something more relevant, or just leave them as they are. For now we have left the junk pages alone; only a couple of the pages rank within the first 50 results for their targeted keyword, and the pages receive very little traffic. However, if the pages you are talking about get a lot of traffic with a very high bounce rate, I would probably try something else.

We can only speak from our experience, but we have had a similar setup on our site now for about 9 months and the effect that our main site's authority has on the blog seems to be slight.  I don't think that Google or anyone else sees our blog as a separate site altogether, but it does seem that they recognize that that portion of our site is a blog and the rest of our site is e-commerce and index our pages accordingly.

Additionally, because our blog discusses a much wider range of topics than just what we sell on the site, it seems logical that some of our site's authority might not carry over to the blog pages because the content is so different.

All of that being said, the effect of our blog has been very positive. It has increased our organic traffic and is a great way to add new content.

The

tag shouldn't pose a problem.  So long as the <title>tags are different and the content of the page itself isn't the same, the similarity of <H1> tags on two pages won't substantially affect those page rankings.</p></title>

Hello,

About two years ago, the company I work for hired an SEO firm to improve organic rankings on our site.  The SEO company's primary method for doing this was producing "articles" that are not really articles but keyword stuffed pages with lots of hidden, internal links to other legitimate pages on our site.

Examples:

http://www.creamright.com/Isi-Chargers-articles.html

http://www.creamright.com/How-To-Make-Whipped-Cream-article.html

http://www.creamright.com/Cream-Whipper-articles.html

Obviously, this strategy wasn't greatly successful and we cancelled our work with the firm.  However, we still have all of the "articles" on the site (about 50-60 pages total) and each page is navigable from the html and XML sitemaps.  Additionally, the SEO firm we used built a lot of useless links to these pages from BS directory sites which are all still active.

The question I have is whether we should remove these "article" pages or should leave them alone?  Although I'm sure they aren't helping any of our SEO efforts, could deleting the pages after two years negatively impact our search rankings?

Thanks in advance for any help on this,

Doug M.