Hi Richard,

Having the link positioned in the upper navigation will help ensure that the search engines view that link as important. Just as importantly, it helps consumers know that the link and information in the blog is important.

Placing links in the footer only remove them from visibility considerably, and search engines can detect link placement on the page, placing less weight or value on that link.

Also, if you are building high quality content in your blog to engage consumers then having that link in an appropriate area increases the potential of your audience finding that content, engaging with it, and supporting what you.

Good luck in business!

The best way to fix the issue is address it from the server level - so page level creation and urls.

Link canonical is good, but is really a tier three level fix.

Starting at the root is best. You will want to ensure you have:

1. A logical taxonomy, which is a breakdown of the core topic into sub-categories for classification purposes
2. A logical way to tag categories and entities with meaningful tags, or search based on title, content (tags or keys work well - a programmer should be able to help with this)
3. Rewriting the urls as was mentioned so that any urls exported are always exact urls and not using variables or queries
4. 301 redirect appropriate core query urls to the new urls, and implement internal links to the new urls to reinforce that content and show search engines that it is priority.
5. Continue to run reports regularly and monitor the amount of duplicate content.

Absolutely agree - content marketing, on top of authority accreditation links and other layers of diverse links built on trust.

Difficult to obtain in practice without a significant creative campaign, and overall those links are as valuable as the inbound links to those sites and pages. Being .edu or .gov inherently does not give these websites more value from a link standpoint. The fact that they are .gov and .edu draws links to them - and that is the reason why most .edu and .gov links on quality, trusted contextual pages count for alot.

There is link-less citation value in having your business name, address and phone number on any indexed document in Google (in my opinion)

Since you mentioned that you are a local company, I believe there would be value in the release from an SEO standpoint assuming the release is high quality and provides value, describing an interesting product or service you market.

I agree with Alan, and would like to add that I believe that using the silo method can increase the proximity of closely connected clusters of keywords better. In other words, by nature, in a silo structure, tightly knit keywords support each other and pass theme and relevance value to each other by default when a strong supportive breadcrumb is in place. Often with a flat site architecture extra programming needs to be done to establish those relationships as they relate to internal pages.