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Its not going to harm your website but if you really want fix it out then put "noindex" meta robot tag into those pages ( 4th option).

Hi EGOL, What I mean by boring is that there's not much linking going on. Sorry for the misunderstanding. I'm fine working in this niche. The client's got some resources, just not a huge budget. Time is not on our side. We are a team of 3 creating at 80 combined hours a week, but there needs to be some results in 3 and 1/2 months, but if we need to have an extension, how long will it take? I'd like to do a back-link campaign to help with the time. Your thoughts? Also, there's only 2 link-heavy (excellent) topics in our industry. The 3rd best has a top competitor with 23 back-links to their page on that topic. What non-link-heavy types of things do we write about?

Darin & CMC-SD.   Thanks for your comments.  I am highly experienced in my field.  Very few guest blogging opportunities are available in the properties that occupy the SERPs I'm competing in.  Smaller indy blogs (whose owners I've known for years) probably offer realistic opportunities for guest blogging. But I don't want to convert their customers to mine. (The product should be inherently local but there are national providers.) My concern is how to counter the "authority" of the copywriters.  I'm concerned that G will look at the authority, page rank and engagement (bounce rate & time on page) of larger sites and reward the copywriter with authority status based more upon the platform they publish on than any real authority on the matters they write. Although G could begin to compare the number of fields an author publishes in and add an educational history and licensing status to G+ pages, I suspect that G wouldn't bother to go through any extra steps (costs).  Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but selling Adwords is G's business and search results just need to be "good enough" without being too darn good. Again, thanks to both of you.

Thanks Guys... Yeah, I figure that's the right path to take based on what we know... But I love to hear others chime in so I can blame it all on you if something goes wrong - ha! Another Note: Do you think this will cause some kind of unnatural anomaly when the robots.txt file is edited? All of a sudden these links will now be counted (we assume). It's likely the answer is no because Google still knows about the links.. they just don't count them - but still thought I'd throw that thought out there.

Thanks.  You're right - I was making it to complicated so I just acquired an easier to remember domain that will 301 over to a single copy of the blog.  I think putting a canonical on every post and hoping for the best would be, as you say, shooting myself in the foot. Thanks for the help.

thanks for your help - much appreciated.

You are so welcome, Zeke!

The Alert thing is great!  I use it when we write new content (along with CopyScape after a week or so) just so I can make sure I'm outranking it.  lol

Thanks for your help Marie. I think I'll add the canonical tag to all the "About" pages leading to the original page like you said.

Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately this decision was made before my involvement.

Yoast SEO plugin now achieves this in my wp theme. Happy times

We have helped many customers achieve TOP 5 rankings without ever using content marketing! In fact, there are many other powerful linkbuilding strategies like : blog commenting on quality blogs with dofollow comments forum posting on area specific forums with incontent links social bookmarking directories preferably good quality one and done manually of course Of course, you might say, this is so old style SEO! And I would have to agree with you, but guess what? they still work quite well even on highly competitive keywords when done properly. Anyway, good luck to you.

SEOmoz used to use Google Search for the site. I am confident Google has a solid method for keeping their own results clean. It appears SEOmoz recently changed their search widget. If you examine the URL you shared, notice none of the search results actually appear in the HTML of the page. For example, load the view-source URL and perform a find (CTRL+F) for "testing" which is the subject of the search. There are no results. Since the results are not in the page's HTML, they would not get indexed.

Agreed. Thanks Cody.

Hi Corey, I appreciate the you taking the time to read through our questions and provide some insight.  Thanks for all of your help! P.S. we're also from Chicago.  So if I see you out and about, remind me that I owe you a brew. Thanks, Drew and the rest of the Logical Media Group team

You can make "how to use" articles without videos.  Most of ours don't have a video - but great photos are really important, IMO. We upload the files to a folder titled /tips/.   Each article gets a very obvious link from product pages.  The are also linked to from a "you might like these" box on related article pages. We also have an FAQ page that  is a huge list of links to  "how to use" articles. How many?   I write a couple "how to use" articles every week and have a huge list of ones that are needed. The topics are often driven by customer questions that we get by email.  We write the article, post it, and send the customer a link.

That would be the best. Those custom made CMS's can be ridiculously tricky sometimes.

According to the updated Google Webmaster Guidelines, widget links and frankly all sorts of paid/advertising links are ONLY accepted if they contain the nofollow attribute. Here's the exact paragraph that clarifies this issue: "Note that PPC (pay-per-click) advertising links that don’t pass PageRank to the buyer of the ad do not violate our guidelines." -according to Google, almost anything that passes PageRank is suspected of violating their guidelines. (source)