Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I am wondering what is the best way to consolidate the rankings/websites to take advantage of the purchase of the competitor's web assets.

Do not make quick decisions with shallow data.

When I have purchased other sites I run them for a while to see what kind of traffic they are making and what easy things I can do to kick it up.  If you are a better webmaster than the last guy you might be able to double traffic and double conversions in one afternoon.  Then you have a better idea of the site's potential.

Also, how much money is that site making compared to yours?

How much does content overlap?

How much more or less keyword reach does other site have?

If you redirect will the extra power push you up the rankings or is the power all coming from the same sources?

If you hold #1 and #2 with your old site then why redirect the #3 and #4 site to allow real competitor to move up from #5 and #6?  That second site is covering your back!

Would a basic 301 re-direct on a page-by-page basis be enough to 'steal' all of the juice their domain name/site has built?

Maybe.  Maybe Not.  It will steal juice only if the redirected site adds link diversity to target site.  If all of the links are duplicated then you gain zero - and just wasted a good site that might have made money .

...their site is 15-years old...

If you consume that site... you might eliminate a LOT of customer loyalty.

Like I said above there are more things to think about than SEO.

Honestly.....   You don't want people who have no idea who your customers are, who your client is or what you are selling to be guessin' and kibitzin' about this.

You need to test this and see which one makes the most money.   If you don't test a bunch of different options then there is almost a certainty that you will leave a lot of money on the table month after month after month.

I'd be working on a bunch of options to test and a method of collecting good data.

How long have you guys been arguing about this?   The website visitors are the ONLY people with the answer.

Write all new content for the site that does not have organic rankings.

I can't understand how this is cheating ?

They have a domain something like ScrantonAutoGlass.com and happen to rank well with it.

Anyone who wants to spend the money can buy ScrantonRealEstate.com or ScrantonAttorney.com.  Then if Google decides to give that domain an advantage,  the person who controls it has been rewarded for registering it a long time ago or for paying whatever price the seller wanted.   It is no different from buying a lot on Main Street.

Some people will argue that Google penalizes keyword domains, but I know that isn't true.  Keyword domains provide a very small advantage that is most effective in weak competition.  This is part of the search landscape.

If you would like to have that small advantage then make the owner of that domain an offer that would be nice enough to persuade him to sell it to you.   If the website is trashy and has no social following, as you report, then they probably don't have an extremely profitable business and might be willing to sell it to you.  Then you will have the domain, all of its valuable rankings, and you can then place your great content upon it, invite your social support there, redirect your current site to it and own a valuable asset.

All of my websites are on keyword domains.  They work great.  Although I had to pay a lot for each of them, the investment has paid back many times over.

This is a business move, an investment, although somewhat speculative.  Google could start treating them differently tomorrow.   I know lots of people who own keyword domains and none of them regret paying buckets of money for them.

I'll add that keyword domains are not invincible.  Plenty of people beat me for queries that I would like to dominate.  Why?  The KW domains don't provide the enormous advantage that most people think, other people have worked hard enough to beat me, and the domains provide very little help for thousands of other keywords that your site might compete for.

Get in touch with the owner, make them an offer that considers how much profit you might make by doing a better job on that domain than they are doing.

Ask yourself... what is the most valuable thing that you can do for your visitors.

Do that next and continue.

We make between four and ten blog posts per day and 90% of those posts include a followed link to another website.  Our goal is to feature news, developments and good ideas in our topic area.   We have no philosophical or SEO problem with linking out.  We think that it makes our site a good information source and that attracts links, subscribers and repeat visitors.

The only downside is that we get lots of weasels trying to get a link to their crappy site.  However, our goal is to link out to sites that are BETTER than ours.

We also link out on article pages... much like Wikipedia does.  Again, we are linking to sites that have great information that is superior to ours in some way.  Don't link down, link up.

To answer your original question.... "Do you link out to good content?"

The answer is "NO" .  We link out to GREAT content.

Do you think these are good services to start consulting with?

Any service that can produce measurable positive value for your client is a good one to start consulting with.

The question is...  Are your skills and expertise strong enough to produce value?  Can you point to at least a few items of content that are at the top of the search engines for valuable queries or that have pulled in massive traffic that resulted in conversions?  Have you taken small businesses from invisible on the web to the top of local search in a moderately competitive market?

Anybody can say... "I can do blogging".    When it comes down to numbers most of those blog posts pull in less than a dozen visitors per month.

So, if you have numbers that would make a client smile and deliver them at a price that works for you then you are ready to offer the service.

Two comments....

1. The rankings of a lot of my keywords flux up and down, especially if they are associated with pages that are less than about a year old.  However, once those pages have a little age and a little strength, the rankings usually become solid.  A few mature pages will have unstable rankings, but these make up just a small percentage of the mature pages on the website.

2. The major exception to the above occurs when the content on your page is the same as the content on other pages on the web.  In those cases, the rankings of your pages can jump around in the SERPs.  They often jump up and down in the SERPs or flash in and out of the supplemental results.  So if you are getting content from other people rather than creating it from scratch, this could be a problem.   Or, if lots of weasels are grabbing your content and publishing it on their site then your rankings can become very unstable.  This problem occurs in both websearch and image search.

I can't figure out how my competitor seems to fit four invisible nav menus into her home page.

Putting invisible stuff into your pages is not a good idea.  Google is well known for slappin' people down if they have stuff in their code that is not shown to visitors.

So, time spent trying to figure out "how your competitor is doing this" is better spent just chucklin' about it and getting straight back to the work of making a good website.

I rarely look at my competitors' code.  I might do that for about ten seconds per year.  I don't have enough time to make all of the content that I need.  Its best to spend time on that.

Joe, I took a quick look at your site and you have done a lot of work on content.  Also, I searched a couple of your topics on Google and saw information that you have created filling the first page of the SERPs on a variety of other websites.  Sometimes your site is on the first page too.

Our approach is very different from yours.  We produce a lot of content - as in your field the potential topics list is enormous.  However, we never give it away.  Everything that we publish is on our own website.  Why?  We don't like to feed our competitors and we want to be the "go to" source for information in our niche.

Consider this..... when I searched for some of your topics I saw your site at let's say position #5 but content that you created on the same subject on websites ranking above you.  If they didn't have your  content on their site  then maybe your site would rank at postion #3 and thus be getting more traffic (and links, likes and tweets).

We spend zero time on linkbuilding.... 100% of our time on content building.  All of that linkbuilding time (lets say you spend 50% of your time hunting links then spending it instead on content would double your content library  and put you in the SERPs on twice as many topics and have twice as much content to impress any visitor.)

The only deviation that we take is to submit occasional... maybe once a month or two... items to sites like Reddit or slashdot or stumbleupon.. where we can quickly share new content with a large number of people.

The links arrive very very slowly... but content that we launched 18 months ago and that ranked in the SERPs on page three at the start is now ranking in the top three positions.  These natural links are so much more valuable than links obtained by other methods.  And they require zero time from  us.

You can make links, likes and tweets occur a little faster by making it easy for visitors to share your content socially.  We use the AddThis.com buttons to facilitate.  They work great.

You asked  what other people do for links... there you have it.

Yesterday I went to several sites such as HuffingtonPost, TechCrunch, WashingtonPost and Mashable who were reported to be "partnered" users.  The number of people using  +1 was puny when compared to the number of people using tweets, Facebook shares, and email.  Almost nobody using it.  Facebook was  500:1 above it.   When I googled the titles of their articles I could see the counts displayed in the SERPs.  It's still early, usage will probably increase over time.

I have the  big AddThis chicklets at the top of my site set to "preferred services and personalization" (it displays services that the visitor has already used to share).   Yesterday I changed the last preferred service to force Google Plusone but it produced a chicklet with a count that broke my design.

So, I am going to watch this for a couple of weeks to see if the usage rate picks up.  I  think that getting a bunch of +1's for your site will be extremely valuable in the SERPs.

My concern about +1 is that the initial information that google has put out about it is not very easy to understand, clicks to dead URLs and has content that will turn off people who worry about privacy.  Also, +1 has been around for a while in other forms and people might be tired of seeing yet another iteration.  I am not betting big money on this one.

My 301s will still be up when I attend my own funeral.

I am old enough that the web will still exist, but for you maybe not.

I need to add an item to my business succession plan about 301s.  Thanks for the reminder.

I view it like this.... high PA is mainly going to pass good linkjuice... however, high DA is going to pass something even more special and that is "trust".

I would rather have kickass DA and low PA than the opposite.

What google wants is authority, relevancy, quality and engagement.

This part is great.

If I have a limited supply of an item, I raise prices so that I make a maximum amount from the stock on hand.   I do the same if I am selling a service that is billed by the hour or by the job and I need to limit its availability.  I allow the customer to decide if they want what I have at the price I want to receive.

If I have other products that are close to what I am short on, I will remove the short supply product from the category page competition.  That will allow people on my site to see comparable products, but anyone who is searching for that product by name might still find my item in search.   For that reason, I would allow one or two links to those pages on the site, but not give that item a "noindex".

The above are pricing plays.

For SEO plays, limiting the number of links that enter the pages that are in limited supply will allow pagerank that originally went into them to flow to other pages.   This was very effective ten years ago when pagerank flow was important.  Today there are a lot of other items in the algo and on-site connectivity to a page is not as important.  However, cutting down the internal links into a page still might be slightly valuable.

On-page optimization, or link-building?

If this is a content site.... neither.... Spend the time to make social sharing very easy.    Any left-over time trying to get links from hub sites in that niche.

If this is a retail site... would go for links from the easy industry and community resource sites.

For both sites would ask for 8 more hours to brainstorm highly linkable content that the site owners will produce.

I think that "nofollow" should be used when links are "paid for" or the destination of the link is "not trusted" or "potentially not trusted".

I would link to my social accounts with followed links.

First, I assume that Site 1 gets more sales and has better rankings than Site 2.  I also assume that neither site has any type of Panda or Penguin or other type of problem with Google.  If that is true....

Do the redirect as you explained... page-by-page.

Then develop a blog on the same domain - in a folder like... siteA.com/blog/

Before you do anything, assess the content on the two domains.  Where you have superior content on Site 2, use that content to improve the quality of Site 1.

I've been waiting for Matt Cutts to talk about this for a long time... finally a YouTube video!

"Should you syndicate your articles out to sites such as ezinearticles.com as a way to build links?"

He discussed this from an SEO perspective and does not recommend it.  I thought that he was way too polite about it... but if you are a guy like him it isn't good to talk trash about the specifics.

One topic that he didn't address was how article marketing can impact your competitive position.  It feeds existing competitors and creates new competitors.  You write twenty articles and they are each published by twenty sites, now there are 400 pages with your keywords out there competing against you.  Not smart, IMO.

Here's the link to the video...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5xP-pTmlpY&NR=1

if you are going to tackle this alone, I would try to leverage as many resources internal as possible

I like this....   it means go to the boss and get a mandate to delegate parts of the SEO job to people in related positions. 

Honest...  It means that you have to train the people who do product descriptions to write the title tags, train the IT folks to keep the site running right, train the sales people to get customers linking back, train the buyers to get suppliers linking back... you got the idea?

Get customer relations to write content, marketing people to write content, product experts to write content, get the CEO to write regular blog posts, find customers who love you who will allow you use their letters.

If I was the manufacturer, I would be jumping for joy.  Every page on your client's sites with rel=canonical on it is passing the SEO value of the page to my website.  This is going to make me buckets of money and make my website really hard to beat.    I might send each of your clients a fruit cake!

Your clients need to know that writing original and substantive content for each product description is the minimum investment needed to be visible in the SERPs.   What you have done will prevent them from getting a Panda problem because of duplicate content or keep the client pages from being filtered out of the SERPs, however, it will not make them any money.

Your options are.....

1. Get a cheap writer to compose minimal content (if they don't cheat and copy/paste or spin the content from another website).  This might bring in a tiny amount of traffic - but if the content is really thin you will have a Panda problem for a low-quality page.

2. Get a better writer to write average-qualilty, better-than-minimal  content.  This will avoid Panda problems and rank better than choice #1.

3. Get a decent writer to write substantive, quality content.  This will avoid Panda problems and rank better than choice #2.

4. Get a good writer and a photographer to prepare superior content with a few generous-size attractive photos with nice captions.  This will rank better than #3 and pull in traffic for more long-tail keywords that appear in the product description and captions.

Even with #4, rankings will be largely determined by the quality of the optimization efforts that you put into your pages, the authority of your domain and the linkage going into each product page.  Doing #4 for a weak website is probably a waste of money, but if your website is of average authority in your niche then #4 could be a good investment.  If you have a strong site in your niche then #4 will be a kickass investment.

We do #4 on almost all of our product pages.  Money maker products get better than #4 often with video.  Best products have articles on separate pages that explain how to use the product, how to fix it, how to select, how to enjoy, etc.

Your reward is usually proportional to your attack, again, as long as your domain has enough authority to take advantage of the content investment.

But... most websites only make money for the hosting company and the developer, because the investments are inadequate to become competitive (or the wrong investments are made).

Most of them are on eight or nine month contracts and are regularly at their offices between late August and mid May.

Mid to late August is the best  time for .edu link requests because professors and university staff are revising their websites for the new academic year.

Guest blogging is one of the activities I’ve never undertaken only because I went down the avenue of thinking if you go to the time and effort of producing great content why would you want it to be on someone else’s site when it could be on yours.

Absolutely.   When I write an article in the topic areas of my website I do not give it away. Much too valuable.  Giving your content away feeds your compeititors and creates new ones.

Have you got any experience of Guest blogging recently?

A guy, well known in my industry, wants me to publish one of his articles.  I decline.  I tell him that I don't want to compete with him.   He bugs me again so I say I would consider it.   He sends me a nice article.  I like it.  Its really good.  I tell him that if I publish it on my site that my site will move into his SERPs and compete with his site.  He says OK and gives me the article.

A few days later I am taking his traffic.  A few weeks later he complains that my site is in his SERPs - above his.  He does not ask me to take the article down (we spent a bit of time creating nice images and making a great presentation of the content) but I know that is what he would prefer.   I don't take it down because I spent time and money to present it nicely.

Today that article is still on my site, ranking well, bringing in thousands of visitors per month in an area of investing.  His site is gone from those SERPs.  He gave lots of articles to lots of people.  Lots of them went to ezine and other popular syntication sites.  I bet the Penguins got him.

**Would you spend your precious time writing for your own website or spend some of that time guest blogging on good quality related websites? **

I write only for my own sites.  My goal is to build my own business. Not to build a business for someone else.

I have not given away an article yet.   I have no plans to do that.   I might write a guest blog for the Pope or someone like that if they ask me... but that isn't going to happen.  If Joe Blowe webmaster, asks for an article my answer is..  "Hell no."... but I would word it nicely.

From MOZ on-page grader...

"Recommendation: Edit your page to use your targeted keywords no more than 15 times."

I think that this is "old school advice" and have addressed it in detail in a recent Q&A question.

Any suggestions about getting my links indexed?

I would go have a beer or an anti-anxiety pill and forget about them.

I know how frustrating it can be when your work is grabbed by spammers.

We have work that has been wildly grabbed and republished by spammers in a competitive industry.  Our approach was to get educated about copyright and fair use, get an attorney ready to help, if needed, and then attack the spammers with DMCA, complaints to Adsense and complaints to hosts.  At first it seemed hopeless, but after nearly 200 DMCA's to Google and a lot of complaints to Adsense and hosting companies we are now seeing rewarding results.

If you are fighting this it is important to identify the spammers and then see if any high quality sites are linking to them, and then go after those links by letting the linking webmasters know that you are the real source of the information.  Before you do that be sure that your online information is totally better than what the spammers have put up.  If the spammers have up your whole collection and you only have half of it up then you are not as attractive of a link target.

Attacking with DMCA is the minimum.  Send them to Google search while logged into your Google account and use the Copyright Removal Dashboard.  That makes it easy for Google to see the mass of complaints that you are throwing at them.  It also makes it fast and easy to file several complaints every morning.

If those sites are running Adsense, attack their income stream.   Visit their site while logged into your adsense account.   Then click on the "ad choices" button in the upper right corner of an Adsense ad on their page.  That will take you to an Adsense Help page titled, "about google ads".   Scroll down to the bottom of that page and you will see "Leave feedback on the website or ad you just saw".   Click "the ads".  Then click "Adwords ad feedback form".  Then click on "An ad violates other AdWords policies".    Use that form to complain that they are publishing your copyrighted content.  I have found that the Adsense team often turns off the ads on those pages promptly and sometimes turns the ads off across the entire website.

Look at the Adsense codes on the websites to see if the same publisher code is used on lots of these sites.  If you find this then hammer those sites with complaints.   Be sure you let them know that these sites have MANY pages that contain stolen content to which you own copyright.  Complain that the same publisher has lots of websites, each with lots of your content.    Complain with enthusiasm.

Hosting companies will often respond by deleting images, pages or text that are your copyrighted content.  They might also delete entire sites.

Keep in mind that submitting DMCA, attacking their Adsense or getting them kicked off of their hosting can make people really mad.   So, be sure that you are within your right and they are not making fair use of your content.  Google or adsense or hosts will give the infringer your name when they notify them that a complaint was filed and they removed them from search, killed their adsense income or booted them off of the server.

Good luck.

(The above contains information about legal matters and I am not an attorney.  I warned you that you need advice from an attorney so that you know if these people are really infringing or if they are using your content under fair use.  If you do any of the things listed above they could get an attorney who will try to sue your pants off.  If you file DMCAs that are unmerited Google might provide free legal assistance or friends of the court support to the target of your DMCAs.   You are dead meat of that happens.)

What are your objectives?

If you have "a message to get out" then you should be sharing your content eveywhere with everybody.

If you are trying to make money and develop a reputation for your site then ask yourself these questions....

- what will happen to my income if ten other sites have each of my articles in the Google index?

- who will get the social sharing for all of my hard work?

- why are these people asking to use my content instead of linking to it or tweeting about it?

The only option that you list that I would do is... "Only let people cite the introductory paragraph sentence, with a link allowing them to read more at our site (with good anchor text)"

Only let others use the exact content well after we've been crawled, so we'll be seen as the first publisher.

You publish first and then an authoritative site publishes.... they will outrank you.  They will receive your traffic.  They will receive your links, likes, tweets, etc.  Thanks!

If I had 17,000 new product pages and the content was excellent I would upload them and link them into the website as fast as possible.  They I would be excited about getting more sales.

If the content is thin, has a cookie-cutter format, or if the product descriptions are duplicated from a feed or found elsewhere on the web I would be scared about getting a Panda problem.   So, I would write new, unique and substantive descriptions before they are uploaded.

I would view 17000 new product pages as an important opportunity and get them written promptly without sacrificing quality.

As a last alternative, I would use skinny content, but noindex these new pages and remove the noindex as the content is upgraded.

With a name like that, even the PhD's at Google will be able to tell that they are trying to manipulate SERPs. 

wondering why these companies pick names that paint targets on their butts

In the question between a subfolder and a subdomain...  it is clear and it is murky...

Search engines say things and often do the things that they say.  They also do things without sayin' that they did them and you are left to figure out what happened or how things work on your own.

If you have been running websites for a long time (24 years here), you might know that Google and other search engines have treated subdomains and folders differently,  identically and murkily.   It depends upon what year and month you are talking about.

**The constant is that subfolders have always inherited ranking ability from their parent domain, and will likely do that into the future.  **

So, if you want assurance into the future, using a subfolder is your best bet.

Looking at DA... it is irrelevant in the subdomain and subfolder discussion.  DA is a moz number that kinda correlates with search engine rankings, but just part of the time.   Ranking ability and DA are different things.

Seen this?

http://www.buildmyrank.com/news/its-been-a-great-run

They seem to be good minded about what happened.

.....are requesting i put a link on my home page...

The Pope can't get a link on my homepage.

As a matter of fact all my post are good (IMHO), but I can churn out only 2 or 3 masterpieces per month.

Yes.  This sounds like me.  I spend a lot of time on a good page of content and usually have help with graphics, photos and data.  A lot of what I produce is among the best-on-the-web for the subject.

With that kind of content I am not sharing.  No way.  In fact, I would not share pedestrian content with other sites because I believe that it feeds competitors and produces new ones.

A few people have offered me great content and I have published it on my site and it now outranks their site.  Some have been happy about this because they have a "message to get out".  But others have not been so happy because they don't like my site above them in the SERPs.

Or should I strengthen my own site striving to be such authority in my niche?  But without strong external link profile  Google shall frown upon me and my site.

The route of not syndicating content for links is very slow to get traction.  Very slow.  It can take a few years to get rolling.  However, after your site is established it becomes hard to beat and then you can spend zero time on promotion and as much time as possible on content creation.  But for this to happen your content has to be really good.  If it is only "better than average" this probably will not work.

Good luck!

Maybe write "Confessions of a Blackhat". 

I can understand how it would be attractive for a company to "own" the content that it publishes.

However, it is possible, if you are getting articles from very high profile individuals in your field, to obtain value from having those individuals associated with the content.    The author also gets credit for the content that they write for you.  This could be "win-win" in many ways and be very different in an author's mind from "they own".

There's another thread asking for this feature, and we're discussing internally if anything around this is feasible, but any implementation would be a ways out right now.

I think that moz should spend their first effort (a big one) making documentation that explains what DA is, what it ain't, how you should use it, and how you shouldn't.  (I know that there is a bit written about it already but people are not reading it and people don't "get it".)

DA/PA is the most misunderstood thing in Moz.  No kidding.

Look how many times people come to Q&A complaining why they have higher DA than the people who are outranking them.    They don't understand it.

Lots of people are worshipin' these numbers, selling increases as a service, crying because their DA dropped a point, using them for their base performance indicators, thinkin' it is connected to Google... etc.

IMO this stuff is a decoy away from productive work.

Just my opinion.  Give me thumbs down if you disagree.

You can get a lot of great help from Moz Q&A.

The best way to accomplish that is the same as pulling in traffic to a website.   That is to start with relevant titles on your questions and then giving a generous description of what type of assistance you need and what you hope to accomplish.

For example, you are looking for help with the technical aspects of wordpress.  If you use "Need technical help with wordpress" or  "Need an SEO check on my wordpress site" as the title of your question, that will attract people who know about wordpress to read it.  Then, in that question give generous information about the current state of your site and what you have done to enhance wordpress so far.  Are you using categories, tags, etc.  The best would be to share the URL so people can actually see what you are doing.  If you are looking for paid assistance, state that.  If you just want people to provide opinions, state that.

Keep in mind that Q&A can bring your experienced advice from highly qualified people but it can also bring unqualified kibitzing.   Its up to you to decide what advice is best suited for you.

Q&A always works best for specific questions, rather than a broad, dig into my website and write me a thesis on how to improve it.  People here might spend 10, 20, 30 minutes looking at your site and giving you a reply.  That can be perfect for specific questions, but can be fatally shallow for a deep evaluation.  So be as specific as you can for best results.  The deep evaluations are best done by someone you have paid for their time.

You mention that you have a photography site.  If you search Q&A you will certainly find that there are hundreds of questions asked by people who own photography sites.   You might benefit a lot by reading them, seeing their questions and reading what type of advice was given.  Photography sites are some of the most frequently discussed types of sites in Q&A.

Good luck to you.

Content republishing

Much of your content has been republished on other websites.  This is generating competition for you and may be costing you a significant amount of traffic.  You can see some of this here.  If a website a lot stronger than yours starts republishing your content you can expect them to outrank you in the SERPs for your own content.  If you can get some of these other sites to stop, use rel=canonical, or at least attribute your articles to your site, that will help.

Interlinking within your articles

I don't see you linking between your articles.  Within an article if there is a relevant tie to another story you should consider linking to it.  This will facilitate the flow of power between your pages.  It will also encourage your visitors to view multiple articles.  The more they see on your site that interests them the more they will like your site and share it, bookmark it, link to it, tweet about it, etc.

Also, at the bottom of each article feature other related articles on your own site.  Study the content ads distributed by Taboola, Outbrain, and other content networks to get ideas on how to elicit more pageviews.  When you have an interested visitor do everything that you can to get them onto another page.

Overall, I think that your site is poorly interlinked. Think about some category pages, some featured topic pages, an image gallery that links to relevant articles.  Get the linkjuice pumping through your site more vigorously.

Call your tribe into action

A site like yours with compelling stories certainly has a lot of supporters.  I think that you can do a better job of calling them into action, mobilizing them to help spread the word about your site and your cause.  Place obvious social share buttons on your site.  Create graphics or text boxes with attention getting titles that ask your visitors to spread the word, share on Facebook, email, link etc.   You have a little of this but you need to SHOUT ABOUT IT.

I don't do anything directly to share my content on social sites or build links.  My visitors do that for me.  Your fans are probably doing this already but if you tell them HOW YOU CAN HELP they will do even more.   Your content is far more compelling than mine.  Use the power of your stories to motivate sharing.  You can probably figure out numerous ways to do this. Brainstorm at your office.

Some other websites and some bloggers might post small banner ads of chicklet ads that link to stories on your website.  Offer them to your visitors, tell them this is how they can help call attention to the problems you address.  Your own audience  is your best linkbuilder.  Take advantage of it.  Tell them what they can do and some of them will do it.  That is how powerful your content can be.

Promote your website on your website

Your site has hundreds and hundreds of stories and very few visitors who land on your site know about them.  You could have topical navigation, or geographic navigation, or theme navigation.   Find out which stories on your site are the most popular the most compelling and feature them prominently. Which ones convert the best.  Do you know the path to conversion through your site.  Learn about these things and set up your site to promote your strongest content.  Make sure everyone knows about these most compelling stories.  If you have a story that lots of people are sharing, mentioning, linking to, do what is needed to make sure that everyone who lands on your site knows about it.  Play your strengths.

I am occasionally contacted by people who want to rent or revshare a subdomain on my site.

These requests always come from people who are unknown in my niche.  The few times that I asked them for more information (they wanted to talk on phone but I told them to send email with samples of their other web properties and an explanation of how things would work).

One hundred percent of the time these are people who simply want to mooch on the popularity of your good domain and expect you to give generous links to the subdomain from every page of your site.

You don't need to settle for a share of the revenue.  Just open an astore at amazon or get a couple feeds from ebay... slap that on a subdomain and you can collect 100% of the revenue yourself.

Here is all I can say.

I run small publishing and niche ecommerce biz with three full time people (counting me); help from a couple smart consultants for technical work and SEO;  two people working very part time on admin stuff; and occasional help from freelancers for artwork or programming.

The small guy can survive if he has expertise in a business niche, can present ideas well on the web and has the ability to get all of the technical details right or hire someone to get them done right.  But you gotta work hard, pick the right niche, and have a nose for what people want, need or don't realize what they want or need.  All of those stars must come together to make the constellation.

Change title tag from this....

<title>Home - Home Care Grand Rapids Michigan - Health Care Associates</title>

To this....

<title>Home Care in Grand Rapids Michigan - Health Care Associates</title>

I believe that google is seeing the first instance of "Home" and associating that with "Homepage".

================================

THEN....  get your target query  "Home Care in Grand Rapids" in the text of your homepage - preferably in the prominent text at the top of the page.

=================================

This will be an improvement but I doubt that it will be enough to fix your problem.   I don't think that your links are competitive.

================================

If I owned this website I would put my big effort into local search.

As the in-house SEO... my jobs are....

-- know the website... know where traffic is coming from and what they do on our site, identify new keyword niches where we can compete, know where sales are taking place, work to improve conversions, use title tags not only for SEO purposes but also to pull visitors into the site instead of our competitors, develop a text and video content plan that will increase our exposure on google and youtube

-- know the products that we sell and how well they are selling, develop new traffic sources for them, identify new product lines that we can strongly compete for or that can be sold to our current traffic, understand profit margins in a way that allows me to prioritize their promotion in search and on-site

-- develop a text and video content plan that will increase our exposure on google and youtube for relevant keywords and for relevant audiences

-- continuously review different parts of our site and product lines looking for changes that might increase our rankings, increase our conversions or increase our popularity with visitors... it is easier to double your income from current traffic than it is to double you income with new traffic

The above isn't all SEO.  Much of it is "webmastering" and "product marketing."   But, I don't think that a person should have anything against wearing multiple hats, sitting in multiple chairs and sticking his nose into anything related to the company web.

Try here.... I bet if you use the phone you will get a really nice and enthusiastic person...

http://www.seomoz.org/about/contact

I have been searching on Google.com with FireFox this morning.

I searched for a state name....  like "georgia".

Then I search for a product... like "guitars".

For the Guitars query the first page of the SERPs include some music stores in georgia.

So, Google is contaminating your search results with information from your most recent query.

Are you seeing this too?   Has Google been doing this for a long time?  Or, I am going crazy?

Don't feel bad.   The Pope's site shows the same thing.

I watch analytics on a website (for a friend's business) that is reasonably stagnant, which just experienced a massive spike in search traffic for no explainable reason.

Try digging a little deeper into the analytics.

If you are looking at his analytics you should be able to see where those visitors were coming from on that day... also pages that they entered and lots more.   The answers are just a few clicks away.

Today Google suggests a MAX CPA of £9.75 and a target of £6.72. what prices do you suggest ? I've set daily ammount at £60.00  And which option should I choose in Ad rotation; Clicks,Conversions or rotate evenly?

If I was taking over a campaign like this....  I would...

1. take another shot at improving the quality score

2. drop the least effective ad and rotate the rest giving conversions the preference

3. write two more ads that might be superior to what's currently the best and in review their performance monthly

4. Google is guessing at your MAX CPA. ... the real answer depends upon your costs of filling a sale and your selling price (which can be tweaked)....   Your goal is to make a maximum profit per day.

========================

If you have not done so, consider reading. Advanced Google Adwords by Brad Geddes.   I have read it twice, and reread some parts of it many times.  Best book anywhere for adwords.

If you are spending major money on PPC then you must attend Brad's Adwords Seminars.  This is  two days of intense training for Adwords.  This is not a fluffy seminar.  The first morning covers the basics and then you get deep into spreadsheet math.  Adwords is not a word game, it is a math game.   This is not a seminar where you will sit, sip coffee, fart and go home an expert.  You are going to do lots of math that will require you to think VERY HARD.  But if you can learn what is being taught you will definitely make a lot more money and your competitors will be making a lot less.

Without further information about the website...  the one that you consider walking away from might have the best links - even if you only get one of them.

The guy obviously has his standards and isn't going to prostitute his site to linkbuilders.

Going to a backup or removing code will clean the files for now.  However, you still have a problem.  You will be attacked repeatedly until you block the hacker's access.

Your wordpress install could be old, it could be compromised, your host could have a backdoor.

If you are not an expert at cleanup your best bet is to hire one.

he runs a social security disability advocacy firm

In my opinion, the percentage of potential website visitors to the Nascar, hunting and fishing content who are interested in your client's services is really really really really low.    You might not make enough money to pay for the content.

Have you considered disability topics?  I think that they would produce more leads and would be related to his client base.  I would go that route long before nascar and hunting.  If I did that I would run a couple of his ads on every page and a couple adsense ads to appeal to any person who arrives.

Rand had a whiteboard Friday about creating content for people who are really high in the funnel.  You are proposing a strategy that is completely outside of the funnel.   I understand how you would like to help this client but this type of content is quite a risky investment if you ask me.

http://moz.com/blog/targeting-your-audience-earlier-in-the-buying-process-whiteboard-friday