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yeah unless we can get input from site owners, I am not convinced those are reflective of actual traffic.  Just not sure.

Right that's what I'm concerned about. Needing to be extremely careful in how the work is done.  I pity the person having to be responsible for that if they're not aware of these issues.  That's all I was trying to get across.

I routinely do audits on sites with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of pages.  We've found good results simply by appending the page info to page Title & Description  so:

Designer Handbags | Unique Pocketbooks | Page 3

I honestly can't offer any short term suggestions. It's a big challenge to know what the best short term path is.  Ultimately, you'll need to remove all the scraped content.  Do that without replacing it and in the short term, you won't see any gains, though you may even see some short term losses as it's possible you're not being purely penalized.

Thomas that's an important distinction.  The quality of the article to target page relationship is critical, and mostly for attracting new visitors regardless of primary SEO value.  Even though visitor clicks do add to SEO as well, there's so much more to the process that if comment links are an intentional and significant part of an SEO campaign it's really more likely to be a timesuck.

I'd like to say "you can only trust numbers if you have access to an individual site's anlaytics.  Except every analytics program is suspect.

Oddly because they're all suspect, I use data for finding trends in the data.  Which brings us full circle to Google Trends.  Apparently Google can't even spot accurate trends.

I'll also add this - if the link and it's surrounding text are NOT directly related in a laser-focus manner to the content topical focus of the article itself, it's not even an ideal link from a "pure" SEO perspective, even if it's high up in the content area.

Which just reinforces the whole "don't get lost on this being such a big deal" concept.

My standard procedure is to have clients include the company name on any "About" related pages, as well as "Contact" related pages, "press", or "media" related pages.  It's important to do this so as to ensure the best chance of outranking other sites that have information on the company. I also don't believe it's necessary to do this with the domain name, since the domain name is already in every internal and external link.

I agree Geoff - home should be home not "keyword phrase", but you can use keywords on other footer nav links if it makes sense from a user perspective, and again, purely within the site.

EGOL,

What did I not read in the question that allowed you the ability to provide a recommendation?  We're talking multiple sites.  In unknown markets.  Without any insight into the quality of the on-site SEO or the off-site signals for these sites, right?

Just checking in because if I missed something and was way off in my response, I need to understand how that happened.

I like this concept a lot. Commonly asked questions can readily be assigned to specific drill-down categories and sub-categories.  Not necessarily based on the topics people assign their own questions though. I've seen a lot of questions here assigned to many categories, not all truly accurate (another symptom of people not really having the expertise, though if they did, they wouldn't be asking, I suppose).

Where would you see pitfalls?  If you've done good work for multiple clients, and if, as you say, it's all above-board and legitimate opportunities, then I would definitely communicate the possible opportunity to the clients, then let them decide if they want to participate.  If so, there's nothing wrong with this at all.  But only as long as you keep it to legitimate implementation, and make it only one part of a larger effort all around.

Joe,

I've done extensive SEO work and numerous audits in the real estate market.  This is a situation where you're comparing apples to Honeycrisp apples.  (yeah, apples to oranges wasn't appropriate for a Minnesota site )

Consider the shear volume of search and number of sites competing for the very generic "real estate" related phrases.  Then do the same for the much more refined focus "short sale" related phrases.

JoeAndCindy.com is competing in a much more difficult market online, and it's trying to target many more keyword variations.

Evaluating links is a very time-consuming process.  You need to be able to look for "patterns" as a primary task IF you need to worry about links.

HOWEVER

I will also say this - your on-site SEO is suffering and just as likely or even MORE likely to be your primary problem. Why? Because you have not stated that you received a notice from Google informing you that your site was flagged for bad links.  If you did NOT get such a notice, while a poor overall link profile can certainly contribute to a generally declining ranking footprint, it's less likely to be the PRIMARY concern.

For example:  Your "Accessories and batteries" category has a terrible topical focus. The page Title doesn't mention what they're accessories or batteries for.  Which means from the very first point of reference on-site, that page fails to communicate the refined focus of the category.  Accessories could be about ANYTHING. And so could batteries.

Then, on that page, the header text "Accessories and Batteries" neither includes that topical clarification, nor is it even a proper "h1" header tag.  There's no descriptive paragraph based content on the page reinforcing and strengthening that topical focus.  Your Canonical tag is NOT SEO best practices for pagination in 2012, and thus that results in massive amounts of content within a category not properly being identified to further reinforce topical authority.  (You should instead be using rel-next/rel-prev and NOT using canonicalization on paginated content, every page title should be unique, and every page within a set should be properly reinforced with it's own h1 tag).

You're not even close to having enough depth of content on product pages (one sentence for the "detailed description), so with all the "related" . product content, sidebar navigation and other "off-topic" content, there's a lot of content on your site deemed "thin" content.

You have SEVERE page speed problems, a very serious SEO factor in 2012. (tools.pingdom.com reported a 9.3 second load time for the home page and URIValet.com reported 15 seconds).

I haven't even begun to scratch the surface here, because you have a SERIOUS on-site SEO problem that you've apparently either failed to understand or chosen to ignore in this question, which indicates there could be MANY more problems on the site.

Heck - several "minor" template fixes alone could boost your SEO, though if you really want to win, you'd be wise to really address all the high priority factors on-site.

Also check opensiteexplorer.org for links to the index.htm version - I see 7 links coming from your blog - feed and pages

If it's accessible to members only (and not open to search indexing), I'd even copy some of my past blog articles into it.  I've referred to a number of them in the past couple months.

If you have multiple variations of www.domain.com/index.aspx linked, each one would, in my understanding of your situation, have one inbound link.  One link pointing to a designated "unique" page is very rarely going to be able to provide any high value ranking.

In addition, each of those "pages" would be indexed and seen as a unique page by search engines.  Since the links would only come from 3rd party sites and NOT from within your site, they'd be even weaker.

So if you prefer to focus on SEO for your site, then links should point to your home page without the index.aspx page name in the URL.

If you won't noindex your category pages, my best suggestion is to add unique content to the home page - split out the content so it shows the X most recent article titles & snippets, and separately (to the side of it or above or below it) have unique home page only content - a good couple paragraphs of it should help.

Ah okay - that notice is definitely a factor then and an important consideration not initially mentioned.  So as long as you have someone else working on the other issues described then we can focus on the patterns concept I initially mentioned.

Several things that stand out when I'm reviewing links on a mass scale.I prefer to look at links grouped by domain in the first pass to help see these patterns.

1. Page titles of pages sending links.  Quite often, they're titles that blatantly scream junk/low-quality or irrelevant to any topic your site is about, or even link-partnerships... or even outright mention SEO.

2. Domain names/URLs of pages sending links. Same concept - they can quite often obviously communicate that they're junk, irrelevant, or blatantly specifically sites for SEO or links.

3. Anchor Text - if you group by anchor text as a next pass, look for links where the anchor text is exact match keywords and then look at the page title of that linking page and it's domain name.  Patterns can be spotted of low quality.  If needed, you can click over to a URL and just look at the page that  link is coming from.

4. After all that process, as you have marked links as being bad, regroup them by domain.  At that point you will likely still need to go through remaining links and go to at least one link from each domain to examine the page or just look at the overall domain for quality.

NOTE - the part where you examine a site sending links does require you to be able to know how to spot a bad site already.  Like - "Can I trust this site?" "Is this site obviously a fake site?" and other such questions need to be asked and answered.

And if a link is on a good site, is it a forum or blog comment?  Is it using an SEO relevant keyword as the person's signature name? Or is it even a legitimate and relevant comment, even if the link isn't using keyword anchors?

There are so many subtle indicators I could add but in reality the best way to go is to dive in and remember to look for patterns.  As you spend the time doing this work, patterns become more and more obvious...

Good to hear.  Don't forget to set up the 301 Redirect to eventually flush out lingering entries in search engines though