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It's best practice to disallow tags from indexation. Check out this blog post (it is based on using Yoast for WP, however the rules still apply) http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success  (Indexation section of article)

Both are great options if done right. My suggestion would be: Use your blog, create a parent category attach a description etc... if need be use child categories & attach descriptions. Use tags wherever possible, do not go over board and remain relevant. Post your articles within the appropriate child categories. You could maximize this effort by having people subscribe to your "post series" they opt-in via email and every time there is a new post a message would be sent to the subscribers. This allows you to stay connected and relevant while building leads. IMO the SEO benefits are greater using a blog as blog posts offer 2way communication, & have a greater tendency to drive traffic & can be optimized easier in and tend to (IMO) be indexed quicker. This is a very condensed version of strategy for what you described but as a general rule of thumb anything dynamic that will require 2-way communication or constant updating / new material is best suited for a blog & anything static that is updated rarely etc... is best reserved for pages. A Knowledge Base for your site is a good idea still and can be optimized. But for the sounds of what you are describing a blog post series would make more sense. IMO.

I don't think this is black hat stuff.  It looks like some type of rotating banner like lots of sites have.  Now, if the so called "hidden" text is just a random list of keywords then this would look more manipulative. In my mind, hidden text is more like when someone displays the text off of the screen with CSS or uses white text on a white background.

Another thing I've seen people use is Tynt at http://www.tynt.com/. If you copy and paste something, it automatically adds a "see more from" and the URL to the end of the copy text that shows up when you paste it. A higher-level question is regarding HOW people are copying your content. Are they going to you website and copying and pasting it, or are they grabbing it from your RSS feed? If they're scraping it via RSS or a non-manual means, doing things with right-clicks won't help much.

Hi Sophia, I want to warn you to avoid just finding places that allow you to 'submit articles' even if they appear to have an established domain authority. A lot of these sites have been overrun with spam over the years and lost their ability to improve your site's authority. Not to mention they will send very little referral traffic. Instead, you are going to want to focus on finding real websites where you can see visible signs of readership and interaction. Look for comments and social shares on current posts. Make a connection with the webmaster and eventually, pitch a guest blog post. Here are some great resources on guest blogging: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-evaluate-guest-post-opportunities http://blog.kissmetrics.com/guide-to-guest-blogging/ http://www.viperchill.com/guest-blogging/ http://www.blueglass.com/blog/guest-blogging-guide-to-leveraging-expertise-influence/ http://www.seomoz.org/blog/guest-blogging-strategies-whiteboard-friday I hope these links help you out. You are on the right path to helping your website. You just have to be careful though, because sometimes the right path is very close to the wrong path. Note: I'm not sure why you ended your question with (except blogs). Is there a particular reason you don't want to be published on other blogs?

Huey- "Scrape" has a negative connotation with original and relevant content. In its purest form it is a waste of time and can only generate problems for your site. But you cant miss the fact that scraping can be an effective way to generate the structure and subject heading for content.........but Donnie is right on the money when it comes to making it relevant to your audience and the visitor. If you arent changing a majority of the content to make it relevant and unique, you are wasting your time. Its like using a set of cliff notes for putting together a paper. Use it as the format and then create unique and relevant content around it. Hope this helps. Mark

Thanks, I developed it myself

Is Authorship used by Google as a ranking signal? (i.e., does it factor into search rankings?) Not for now, but it isn’t off the table. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-authorship-an-interview-with-googles-sagar-kamdar-part-1 I'd worry less about the short-term impact of authorship on rankings, and more about how you can use authorship to provide better access to your great content to your audience. That's not an argument against implementing authorship, but it's a re-framing of the reasons why you may or may not pursue your above-suggested course of action.

Now that is interesting, I'd never heard that. I thought dofollow or no follow only had to do with passing link juice. Anyone else concur with this?

Hi Joanne Nofollow attribute is very important ,  "Nofollow" is generally used to tell search engines Don't follow links on this page. You don't trust on links which are linking to your site. So you can discourage untrusted user comments or guestbook entries in your comment page . If you want to use "Follow" then you have to moderate each and every comment on your page so Nofollow is batter option.

Not directly, but you might be able to find someone by searching LinkedIn for employees at TripAdvisor and then use Distilled's technique to guess anyone's email address using the Rapportive Gmail plugin: http://www.distilled.net/blog/miscellaneous/find-almost-anybodys-email-address/

Hi Mark, Nope none of the above - and what you see is exactly the report I get from SEO Moz. And like you I can't identify where the duplicate content is. Short of deleting the blog page (and consequently the multiple URL's) I'm not sure what else to do?

Great question!  I think this is a question that a lot of people are thinking about right now.  I know we've thought about it recently. This question, definitely has a lot to do with company culture.  Remember that the rel=author tags connects to personal pages not company pages, so the important question is, do you still want people who no longer work at your company to support it?  Obviously Google's rel=author does have an SEO impact, however if these people were unhappy when they left the company having their friends see your company in Google search with an image of them might leave a bad taste in there mouth. If you don't have this problem and don't think people will mind, I say go for it, especially if they are G+ users.  This will affect the searches of people in the Authors circles and hopefully have an overall impact on your search volume.  It will help authors who are no longer with your company, through branding and will help your company overall, so it will be a win/win for both parties.

Thanks! The problem is, the businesses have two completely different names/branding/logos, etc. I'm trying to create a seamless & separate experience for both cities. Would an alternative (albeit less desirable) option be to re-write the content on the duplicate site? Or at least change it enough to not be so identical?

Are you going to be converting the whole website to sit on a wordpress platform? Nothing to really worry about just be careful whenever making large changes to already ranking pages. Be extra careful and double check before setting it live.

PRWeb.com is the industry standard, but the entry-level plan is next to worthless.Your best bet is reaching out to relevant publications/blogs manually.

thanks, that's along the lines of what I was thinking. Given the age and the score of the domains I would rather word to get them back again than start again with brand new domains.