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Nigel has provided a comprehensive answer and was very generous to put so much effort and time into it.   I agree with his assessment.

I am always tempted to "start another website".  However, if I do that I must take my efforts away from websites that are already successful and put that effort into websites that are starting with zero content, zero fans, zero visibility, zero resources of any kind.

If you can afford hire and toss another team of high quality people at improving the sluggish site then maybe you can pull it off, but if your primary website is not dominating the SERPs in your area, then I would probably put that same team to work on the primary site.

I would not start a second website or put resources into a secondary website unless my main website is dominating the SERPs and then I would still be working to raise the bar to fend off anyone out there who is getting any ideas about coming after my turf.

Is anyone aware of a significant event in September in the search engine world that may have influenced our organic traffic?

Many things could cause a drop in traffic.  Here are the things you should check where data is available or consider if you don't have the data.

• Google is showing more Adwords ads above the fold
• Google is showing more Shopping ads above the fold
• Google is showing more "people also ask" units
• Google is showing more features in the SERPs like news, images, video, etc.
• Google is showing more knowledge boxes and featured snippets

Lots of people have lost traffic to the above in the past year - even if their organic rankings are HIGHER

Maybe competitors are hammering away at your traffic..  Amazon and WalMart and Ebay are working really hard and spending billions to dominate the SERPs - and there are millions of third-party sellers listing items on all of these websites.   Lots of dirtbag sites are stealing images, rewriting and spinning the content of other websites.  Your competitors are working every day to take positions from you.  If you are not working     every    single    day     they are doing that to take your positions.  They are hungry and working hard.

A person or a small team or even a huge company can be working like mad and not be able to stand up to all of the above.  For as long as there has been competition on the web, these things and more have been killing business almost as fast as they arrive.  There are only ten organic positions (or less) on the first page of google and everybody wants them and Google is now using up to 50% or more of the real estate on the first page of the SERPs for their own stuff.

All of the above assumes that you have a great website with worthy content.  If you website is anything less then Google's quality filters might hit you.   If you are not compliant with Google's guidelines then other filters might hit you.

This is the way of the web and all of the above are accelerating and not slowing down.

I would wait a little longer before getting really worried.  Sometimes redirects can take time.

Meanwhile, I would make a decision about complaining directly to the infringer or filing a DMCA complaint.  If you are not familiar with DMCA, fair use and copyright, there can be some risk in doing these.  I consulted an attorney about these types of problems when I first started having them.   Now, I usually act on my own to file DMCA and consult him when there are questions.

If the infringement is on a strong and wild competitor and I fear retaliation, the attorney might contact them for me.  If the infringement is on a respectable website of importance, I contact them myself and tell them the problem.  They usually respond.  If it is simply a spammer grabbing my stuff, I go straight to DMCA.

If you file DMCA and Google approves, things will happen quickly.  Within a few days your request will be reviewed and BAM, the infringer will be gone and your site will usually be back.

**What happens if we canonical from A to B and set redirect from B to C? **

Keep in mind that rel=canonical is optionally obeyed by Google and some people would say that it is recognized by Google by chance.  So, when you place that on a webpage Google might honor it or they might not.  How they honor it today might be different from how they honor it tomorrow  ---  and Google often changes their mind about such things without telling anybody.  And, so far, they are not telling anybody EXACTLY how they treat 301 redirects and because of that, in my opinion, anyone outside of Google who gives firm answers to how rel=canonicals work knows not that he knows not.

If you want these pages associated with one another then you should use 301 redirects and not canonicals.  301 redirects are on your server and they force visitors and Google crawlers to your intended page.  Still, Google might not give full credit for them (but they say that they currently do), however, if you want to pass value from one page to another, a 301 redirect is the most assured way to make that happen, in my opinion.

I think that your  **What happens if we canonical from A to B and set redirect from B to C? ** is looking for a far reaching answer.  Nobody can tell you with assurance what is really gonna happen.  And, again, what happens can be changed by Google at whim and without no notice.

We know of a case from early 2017  in which Google stopped honoring rel=canonical for a large number of pairs of pages that were not verbatim duplicates.  Shortly after that all of those pages were indexed and displayed in the SERPs.

should we invest more on adwords and organic isn't important like before??

The first question..... Can you make a profit with Adwords?   Most people don't make a profit and don't know it because they don't know their real costs and margins  -- or they hire an SEO who bids without any of that information.

Second question...  Can you pull off the rankings?... Most people can't... and that's why they are blowing their dough on Adwords.

Answer those questions and you know if you should take Door #1, Door #2, or Door #3 (which is try a different project.

Nigel's suggestions are right on.

We redirected subdomains into folders on the main site and the results were KICKASS.     KICKASS.  We started producing a lot more traffic and making a lot more money.

Many people who own information sites are always looking to upgrade their content.   If you have fantastic photos or kickass content that without any question will significantly improve the article they might like to hear from you.  I've gotten really good photographs from people who have access to places and things that I don't have access to.   I've also gotten really good content from people who know a lot more than I do about specific topics.

If someone accepts your offer they will probably be willing to give you a credit and a link in the photo caption or mention as a contributor with a link in the "about the author" blurb.   Sometimes they might add you as a "recommended reading" or a "reference" if you contribute and if your site has information that is a lot better than theirs on a certain aspect of the topic that they have not addressed.

I would not bother people unless your contribution is going to make a relevant and important lift to the content.  I've heard from a couple people who have become regular sources for photos and advice... and what they provide is not available from anyone else anywhere at any price.  I am so happy that they got in touch.. they have become good friends and now I go to them when I need something.   I also hear from people who get deleted,  marked "spam" or blocked from my inbox.

Every business will get a few bad reviews.  The Pope could be selling Bibles and get bad reviews from cranky customers or customers who blame the Pope when the package is lost on the mail.

The client probably has a nice business, is perfectly honest and does an excellent job.  Don't worry about one review.

Lots of people have problems with redirecting old URLs to new URLs, making sure they are done properly, making sure that none were left behind, putting them in the right format and order in the .htaccess document.

A thought about blocking competitors...  Most people who land on your website are not going to purchase anything.  If your conversion rate is 2% then 98% of the visits are not made by buyers.  If you have a lot of content pages on your site that receive good traffic then your conversion rate (sitewide) is probably a lot lower.

Your competitors might be bidding good money to have their ads appear on your site.  So, it might be a profitable idea to allow the ads and take a piece of your competitors' ad budgets - even if you might lose a few sales.  When you make money from ads you don't have to do any work, but when you make money from sales you must do work - not only filling orders but also supporting customers in their use of the product.

We allow many competitors ads to appear on our site, especially those who because of prices or services are not real competitors.  The only exception might be those who are extreme in their price discounting or on websites that are selling consumables and have a very high rate of repeat ordering.

At times we might be running low on stock or have employees out.  At those times we might become very aggressive with ads, inserting them high on the page or above the header.  These options are built into our design.

I don't have any formal testing to back these observations.  These are simply what I have noticed by experimenting with affiliate programs for twenty years.

**  I believe that google strongly dislikes "thin affiliate" websites.  These are sites that are monetized by affiliate links but that have very little real content or low value content.  I believe that they are subjected to a "quality filter" that is more strict than the "Panda" algorithm.

**  If you link to affiliate websites, expect those links to drive the affiliate site higher in the organic SERPs.  So, if you are competing in the organic against the affiliate program site, you will empower them at your own expense.

**  I have used Adsense on all of my websites since the first week that Adsense was available.  I've learned how much money different ad positions on the page can produce with Adsense, then I have compared that to what affiliate ads produce in the same position.  Adsense almost always make more money - not a little more money, a lot more money.

**  I have also compared the amount of money that I can make using affiliate links to the amount of money that I can make by stocking the product and filling the orders myself.  I make a lot more money filling the orders myself.  There is no comparison.

**  What I have not tested is how much can be earned by using hypertext affiliate links within the paragraphs of my content.  In those locations, I am using links to sales pages on my own website or to articles on my site that are relevant to the links.  I am confident that the sales links to products that I sell and fulfill myself will make a lot more money.  I think that links to my own article content are valuable, but if they are more valuable than a small commission, I can't answer - but I'd rather keep the visitor on my own website.

I'd have my own domain too.   You control it there.

If the big company every goes bust then all of the equity that you have earned remains with you.  If you ever outgrow the value offered by the parent company, you don't have to worry about losing your web presence if you leave.

Don't build your house on land that belongs to someone else.

If your site has a penalty, fixing it will require determining why the penalty was given.

Most likely it has something to do with breaking the webmaster guidelines.  That is best assessed by the webmaster himself, and if the webmaster can't do it then an expert at identifying Google penalties is the best bet.  People who are not experts at penalty identification will be guessing and you don't want to guess, do the recommended work, wait to see if the site recovers, then see no recovery, guess again,work, wait, find nothing happens, etc.

Its possible that you have a single-page penalty, though those are rare.

For another site with duplicate content to displace a page of your site from the SERPs, it usually has to be about the same strength as your site or superior to your site.

Some of our pages will swap in and out of the SERPs when the same content is on other websites of similar strength.   If we can't get the content removed by contacting them, and their use of the content is infringment, a DMCA complaint to google will usually fix the problem within a few days.

Marketers tend to think that they need to exhibit their "marketing expertise" by acquiring multiple certifications, accreditations, etc. within the marketing industry.  However, in some cases, they might be better served by earning proof of their expertise within the clients' industries, many of which have their own certifications, accreditations, etc.

It is easy for a potential client to be put off by a marketer.  They are spammed by marketers     every    freeking    day.     But, that same client might be impressed by a person who has earned respectable credentials in the industry where he is working.  Finally a marketer who knows wtf he is talking about.

Try copy/pasting a couple random sentences from your content between quotes in a Google search.  This will show if someone has grabbed your content and has a verbatim duplicate indexed.  If another site with reasonable power has grabbed your content, they can displace you in the SERPs.   Also, do a screen capture of the SERPs when your site is present, and another when your site is missing.  If a different site is on the first page of the SERPs, check it out to see if they have grabbed some of your content and pasted it on the page that replaces yours.

I agree with James... but if you place all of these links at the bottom of the page you will not make much money.

Also, consider who persists to the bottom of your articles.  They are your very best visitors and your potential evangelists and linkerati.  Instead of blowing them off to an affiliate site, recommend more of your content to them.

And... when your affiliate links are higher up on the page your less interested visitors or your highly distractible visitors will use them and you will make money as they leave - probably a LOT more money.

All of my best producing ads are high on the page and the bottom of my page is where I recommend more content.  I learned not to sell my most valuable visitors.

I would make a permanent page.

If you want to preserve the historic information, make a new page for it... or a new page for each year... and link to them from the permanent page.

Don't do redirects unless you have to.

their own business name

In almost every instance page one organic position should be possible in a reasonable amount of time... and if they are a local business the time required for them to be in the #1 organic position should be quite short.

keywords they want to rank for

Some keywords have brutal competition and in many cases page 1 organic rankings will either be impossible for the business or so costly that acquiring them will not make economic sense.   The problem that many clients face is that they have hired an SEO who doesn't really know what is required to attain the desired ranking, charges the customer a certain amount per month, and the SEO does not have the ability to pull of the desired ranking even if the budget was 5x as much.  In these cases the client is left in anticipation that goes unfulfilled.

So, the SEO needs to:  1) know what the client wants; 2) determine the business reward for acquiring it; then, 3) explain the probability, the cost, the timeframe for acquiring it (making disclaimers that aggressive efforts of other businessess in the space can move all of these goalposts at anytime).  Then the client is fully informed and they can search search search with little concern to the SEO that they are looking for to deliver results.

Google is becoming a better webmaster and making more money from their website.

In addition, google is placing more features in the SERPs that cause you to view more pages on Google.  Much of the "heat" in the "algorithm" weather reports is actually Google tweaking the UI... and SEOs are not smart enough to know the difference.   They are so intent on "watching the tools" that they don't know that Google is subtly grabbing a little turf here and a little turf there.

We publish all of this content on our own site.

We don't syndicate, share, or guest post anything.

Instead we promote the library of information on every page of our website, link to it in the persistent navigation, guide customers to it when they write to us for information, feature it in a newsletter that we send every month, and let industry groups know that it is available for viewing on our website.

That's what we do.  Our customers and site visitors then share it for us.

Lots of Google ranking factors are beyond the reach of the typical SEO toolset...

The entire area of visitor engagement, how people arrive at your site through non-search methods, and more can all be important.

I believe that Google uses these more and more every year.

Might be a robot checking to see if you have changed anything. Lots of people use these.

Might be a competitor waiting for you to publish something and then grab it.

I believe that a retail site should have an article library where there are articles about how to select the proper product, how to use it, how to maintain it, how to enjoy it, history about the product, trivia about the product, and many other topics.

The decisions about what type of content should exist in this library are guided by the customer questions that you receive every day.  As the library grows it answers more and more customer questions and this reduces your need to respond to questions by email.  Many people find the answer in your library and don't need to ask you.  Many people don't know about your library and write and you respond with a couple of links to library articles instead of composing a lengthy reply.

Your customer service people are already being asked these questions, they are probably already writing replies or they are answering the questions by phone every day.  If you have customer service people who know more about your product than anyone else on the planet then they can be your source for the content that you need.  But, if your customer service people don't know anything about the product and can't answer these questions, then you should do something about that so they can do a better job.  Then they will become your source for the content that you need

If you are serious about doing a good job in your space, having customer service people who can help the customers, then you will have a program in place to educate them about your products.  On the basis of the above, every retail  site should have a growing content library.

However, the most powerful site in the retail SERPs is going to be an information site with a small store.

First ask..... Why do I want this traffic?

Do I want traffic just to have it?   Or, do I want traffic because I want these people to do something after they land on my site.

You have control over this.

So, decide what you want to happen, make content that will pull in the right people, and build a site that will get those people to do what you want them to do after they arrive.

The goal and the method are different for every business.

Canonicals are intended to connect verbatim copies.  If you get a submission, it will be significantly different from the main contest page. So canonical is not applicable.

We observed that Google stopped honoring canonicals where the two pages were quite different sometime between November 6 and November 13, 2016.

If your "contact us" page is ranking then either you have a really powerful domain or the competition in these SERPs is not high.  You could prepare a second relevant page and launch it to see if it replaces the "contact us" page.   Or you could noindex the "contact us" page to prevent it from displaying, or make the "contact us" page relevant and link it to your sales page.

I've found that multiple pages get rank for my main query.

I would do a manual search and see if you do have two pages ranking for your main query.   If this is true, and you have two pages ranking for your main querry, then I would be very happy about that.  I would not consider it to be a problem, in fact, if this continues for a couple of weeks, we might take and afternoon off an go out for beers. 

If I can get two pages ranking for important queries, it pushes competitors down in the SERPs,  it brings more traffic to my website.  I would not worry if one is a sales page and one is an article page.  I will place obvious ads and links on the article page that move traffic to the sales page.  Two pages of my site in the SERPs always gets rid of a competitor.  Nice work.  Yahooo!

We intentionally try to get multiple pages ranking in the same SERP by adding articles to compete with important sales pages.   Although some people think that keyword Keyword cannibalism is a bad thing we celebrate it here.  We try, and often succeed, at getting two, three, or four pages into the same SERPs and push our competitor down to position #5.  Whack!  Take that!

I know people, many of them, who don't like to see two pages from their website on the same SERP.  They think that it is a 'waste of energy' or something.   I have no hesitation to reach for the throat of my competitor with both hands.

If I was a potential customer and encountered a website with these content problems, I would not buy a cake.  I would be afraid of getting one made with soap powder instead of flour because the business is so careless.

The answer to this question depends upon

-- the strength of your site

-- the competitiveness of the niche

-- who is competing in the niche

-- how much work you plan to do to promote the page

-- your skill level

-- and many other factors

One of the biggest problems in online marketing is faced by the client who asks an SEO to promote his website.   SEOs often give them a monthly price to work on the site - such as $1000/month - and have no idea of how long it will take to get a return for the client.  SEOs can give a severely low number and work happily for a long time without producing results. Why? Because the SEO is doing $1000 worth of work per month but the competitors are doing $5000, and the client sees his rankings fall after hiring the SEO.  Furthermore, the SEO might be charging $1000 and don't know what he don't know and that $1000 has negative value for the client - for example, those hit by Penguin.

It takes a lot of experience, knowledge and study to know how much force must be applied to move the needle.   Sometimes you can know what to do and how to do it but you don't have the ability to pull it off.

"One may know how to conquer without being able to do it." Sun Tzu

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."  Sun Tzu

http://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html

Full link juice is now passed through redirects.   Google stopped dinging the value of links that pass through a redirect about a year ago.   More info here....

http://searchengineland.com/google-no-pagerank-dilution-using-301-302-30x-redirects-anymore-254608

Everything that goes onto our websites is optimized for search.  Writing content, taking photos, preparing images takes a lot of time.  Keyword research takes very little time but if it is done right it can reveal a treasure trove of potential traffic.  Not doing keyword research is like not picking-up money.

A person getting ready to write should have some idea of the keywords that will be targeted.  They should also be thinking about the title tag and description tag that will be written to elicit clicks.  Takes very little time, can improve the writing, can improve the conversions.  These people would get a talkin' to if they worked at my office.

If you use nofollow, then no search engine value passes through the link.

I would not do that with links on my own website.

I would also stop worrying about a link to your privacy page in the footer.  It is almost a requirement of doing business and everyone has them.

Use both.

Breadcrumbs help search engines and visitors understand the structure of your website.

In-content links get clicked by visitors, and they might pass anchor text value to pages within your site.

I would look first at how my existing content is competing.  Is it delivering traffic, making conversions, whatever your goals for the content might be.  Then, based upon that, I would decide of 4x that amount is the right decision or going for higher quality might produce better results.

Thank you, Roman.

This is a way to build your content, grow a tribe, and sell from a newsletter, all at the same time.

We are building a website using this method.

I would pick a couple product categories that....

• you will be selling long term

• you are able to write about from deep experience

• you receive numerous customer questions

• your customers have lots of repeat orders for consumables and accessories

Then I would start writing detailed product guides and publish them on my own website.  Make this a library of information about those products. How to select, how to use, how to repair, interesting things that people do with them.  Make this the best guide to these products on the web.

Start with a single product category and offer a newsletter.  Then, when you add a couple of pages to your guide, send them to these people.  Focus on information about the consumables and accessories.  Announce new products and show how you use them.

Maybe.

But, if some of these have grabbed all or most of your text, then filing DMCA is what I would do.  Before you file DMCA be sure that you know the risks and especially know the rules related to fair use.   See an attorney before doing it if you have any doubts about your understanding.

Are you going into the supplemental index or are you totally gone?

If you are going into the supplemental index then these guys using your content might be having an impact.

**those are thing that you only do once you are ranked on the 1 st page **

In my opinion, the content richness and detail are what causes visitors to value the page, share it, and occasionally link to it.  They are also what google sees as part of a superior page and rewards with rankings.

want to decrease your bounce rate and increase your user engagement on the page

I believe that these are ranking factors.  Build them in first.  You will get faster results and need fewer links.  And these are the attributes of a page that earns links.

I think that the best use of a content creators time is to do a rightful job on the first pass, rather than come back later to patch and repair.

Beat everyone, by including a map of each tour, photos of scenery, rate the difficulty of the ride (with explanations of the topography), how long it takes most people to complete, interviews with people who have completed the route and suggest stops for lunch or refreshments.  Don't play around thinking that a price and a level and two more tours is a competitive advantage.  Blow the competition entirely out of the water.  This is war not tiddlywinks.

Lots of companies do this.   On their media page they link to third party coverage of their work.

Your situation is kinda the reverse.  You are showing where your authorship has landed.  I don't see anything wrong with it - unless it is done at scale... but I am not Google.

Sounds rather aggressive.

Yes.  It is also aggressive to fake a location.  Might be criminal in some situations.

Perhaps Google does this in response to competitor reports, and, in which they can't confirm the presence of an office through public information.

To submit a DMCA to Google, log into your search console and go here https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard

Fill out the form, press "submit" and the complaint will be filed.  Then push the back button, edit the form, press submit again and your second complaint will be filed.  Using this method you can file a hundred complaints in an hour or so.

Before you start filing DMCA complaints you need to have a thorough understanding of copyright law - especially fair use.  I suggest going to an attorney, explain your problem, how you intend to solve it and let the attorney educate you.  Filing an inappropriate DMCA against another webmaster can get you sued.

**Do you check prior to writing your unique content whether any other sites have similar content? **

If I write the content or if one of my employees write the content, it is going to be unique.... because it isn't short, because it goes into specific details, because it might include personal experience.

How do you manage keeping on top of this

Make sure that everyone knows that there are no shortcuts in producing content.  Nothing is to be copied.  Nothing.  Let them know the consequences to your business if you are found with infringing content on your site.  Let them know their personal consequences if this happens.

How do you know/keep track of other sites taking your content?

You can use  a service like CopyScape.com.   Posting their logo on your site will be some deterrent.  Having explicit copyright statements and warnings on your site is very important. There is a cost to this, but if you have a problem they can be a bit of help to some people.

I know someone who embeds tiny 1x1 images within his content.  Then when these are loaded on other sites by a copy/paste action, the code will be on their site calling for the image with every pageload.  The images will load from your server and identify the infringer.

In a lot of cases, this is caused by thin or duplicate content in one of the following ways.....

---  verbatim use of manufacturer's description

---  description of minimal length

---  two or more websites using the same description

One of my websites was selling a number of products that were made in China.  I wrote unique and lengthy descriptions for each one of them.  Then dozens of other websites grabbed my descriptions and used them verbatim.  My page (and many of the duplicates, went into supplemental).  Back then I did nothing and stopped selling those items.  Today, I would get aggressive and file a lot of DMCAs to Google, to hosts and to Adsense, if they are using it.

I believe that the folders that your pages are placed in are less important than the linkage of your website.

Folders are the structure used to organize files on a server.

Linkage is how a website's structure is presented to the visitor and to Google.  Linkage includes your persistent navigation, breadcrumbs, and the in-content links that you are publishing to visitors.   It can also include link inputs from other websites.   This is the structure that Google uses to discover how linkjuice and visitors flow through your website.  Then they will use that information to decide which pages and parts of your website are really important.

Files in the same folder can have dramatic differences in importance on the basis of linkvalue, visitor useage, and traffic entry.  They can also have very different power inputs produced by links into them from other websites.  Files deep in folder structures can have higher PA than your homepage,  files deep in your folder structure of your website can get more traffic than your homepage.

It is not unusual for a website to have third-level (and deeper) pages that get 10x as much traffic as the homepage.  These are pages that have gained visibility in high volume SERPs or have gained visibility across an enormous number of queries.

Its possible that 90% of visitors never see the homepage.   Instead they land on a deep page and are routed through the site by effective navigation, breadcrumbs, on-site search and in-content links.

Wikipedia is an example of a website where folder structure is meaningless and enormous traffic and linkvalue flows through in-content links.   Amazon is a site where folder structure is meaningless and enormous traffic and linkvalue flows through dynamic persistent navigation, dynamic breadcrumbs, product recommendations and powerful on-site search.

Consider how your site can best serve the visitor.  Decide how you can modify that to make the site best-serve your business goals.  There is where you should spend significant thought and time.

Right now my company is blogging five days a week, which is way more than our competitors and most other companies do.

Five days a week might be focusing on quantity.

Blogging will not do anything for your website if the content is not quality... and when I say quality, I mean good enough to attract traffic and natural links.   If you are not blogging quality you might be adding dead weight to your website and it might even be Panda bait.

Look at your analytics.  Are your blog posts pulling in any traffic.  Are they pulling in any conversions.  Are they attracting natural links from respectable websites?   If they are not doing these things then blogging for blogging's sake is a waste of time.

Instead of comparing how many times you blog per week, take a look at how your quality compares with your competitor.  Determine if the content is useful to your visitors and be very critical and honest with yourself.   Are your visitors even seeing it?  Does it answer their relevant questions about how to use your products, how to select them, how to maintain them, other information about them?

If you are blogging daily and are doing a good job there should be a lot of visitors to your website who arrive through your blog home page or arrive through the main page of your website and click into your blog.  If that isn't happening then, maybe your blogging is not useful.

Do the assessments above, reflect upon your plan and don't worry about how many days per week you are blogging.  Worry about if you are blowing your competitors out of the water with the content that you are producing.