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1.  Detect crawler type.  If it's the mobile googlebot, and it comes to the regular site, redirect it to the mobile site.  If the regular googlebot comes to the mobile site, redirect it to the regular site. You should also do this as a best practice based on all visitor browser types.  It's not cloaking, it's serving up the proper version of the site to the source it belongs with. You can see Matt Cutt's help video on this subject here.

2.Create a mobile sitemap file and submit it to Google and Bing.

If you do this properly, you should not have any problems with duplicate content because they're sophisticated enough to understand that you're not trying to serve up two sets of content to the same visitor type.

Ah yes - that's a challenge.  From experience, I know that Google is "mostly" good at seeing and factoring in dynamically generated content when a page is coded to ensure the dynamic content is inserted into the DOM (Document Object Model).  There's even a good article about this concept over at SearchEngineLand - written by Adam Audette - someone I respect as an advanced expert in the industry.

However, even though that's the case in my experience and based on what Adam's team found, the only ultimate test I personally trust, really is Google's fetch and render system.

your links are buried in the code of the source of the main page, but in a way that they're obscured from proper evaluation by search engines.  Links from within javascript popups are very rarely able to pass the value you're wondering about.  Google does it's best programatically to read and interpret javascript, yet it's a far from perfect implementation, and there's no way to be 100% sure that you're getting any inbound link value from that article.

You could potentially go through Google Webmaster Tools or OpenSiteExplorer.org to see if those links show up in your listed inbound links, yet it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack depending on how google sees those links, if it does at all.

It may have been implemented to avoid passing link value.  Yet it may have been implemented by someone who thought it was a pleasing user experience, clueless to SEO.

Digging a little and it looks like a totally fake site by some hack SEO.

Any time you see a link in a suspicious site's footer that says "SEO xxxxxx xxxx" (in this case "SEO Company Perth" that's a massive red flag.

To the left of that link is a link "LEF" - that points to a Link Exchange site. How obvious is it then that this is a bogus site?

Other clues:

No other navigation links of any value that communicate "this is a legitimate web site".

The "Remarkable US Presidents main navigation link has links in it that just point to another hack site "MTI-USA.com" and THAT site, even though it's got "USA" in the domain, links to a Perth "digital agency"...

Bottom line, it's a mess. And the lesson here is don't get caught up examining competitor links assuming you see something that could be helping them unless you know what you are doing. All it will result in is your site being slapped with penalties.

Macy's, Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Fortunoff, Gap... All have their Brand in page Titles.

Interestingly, Gap uses the combination of Category | Gap | Sales Hook (a hybrid of my suggestion and EGOL's) on many of their pages.

If you have your sitemap xml file(s) set up properly, you can resubmit them each time you update that specific content. If the site is very large, I would suggest having a separate sitemap file just for those review pages within the site, and resubmit that one specifically.  That can help motivate Google to recrawl that content sooner.

Also, do you have "last-modified" meta tags set up? That can help as well.

Depending on how high the quality of the content is, it can also help to send other signals

• • Update the home page with a link to the newly updated review right in the upper portion of the home page's main content area.
• • Consider a quality, not over-optimized, press release you distribute through a trustworthy release site - where you issue a press release describing the full review and only linking ONCE in the body of the release, directly to that review.
• • Tweet a link to the review page on the day you post the review as well.  Now that Google is integrating Twitter more, that can further help visibility.

Each situation is unique so there's no one answer.  Here's a great article by Lindsay on options.

What is the relationship between site A and site B? Is it a "legitimate" "owned by or managed by the same company" relationship that would exist even if SEO didn't exist?

If so, it is valid to link from one site to another. If not, those links become more questionable as to "why are these here?" understanding.

Even if there is a legitimate reason outside of SEO, what is the overall signal? If they're keyword based links and not just using anchor text that shows the name of the destination site, they're more vulnerable to suspicion.

Even in those situations where there is a legitimate "we're just providing links to another property we own" links, and they're not using keyword anchor text, there is still some "slight" vulnerability, however it's minor compared to keyword anchors or "not here for reasons outside SEO" issues. Because of that, the best practice is to nofollow them just to be "safe" in the age of Penguin and manual reviewers who might mistake a legitimate linking reason for an attempt to over-optimize inbound links.

The only evidence I've seen of longer being more valuable is in how transcripts are treated.  A longer transcript will garner higher value if the video is crafted to target specific keyword phrases, just as a well crafted page of written content will be more likely to outperform a much shorter page on the same topic.

As for videos themselves, I haven't seen any specific case studies on the topic.  Would make a great case study for you to do and write about! I'd definitely link to it!

I don't do much in the way of competitive research anymore given that the majority of my work is now doing strategic audits (competitive analysis is a tactical level effort).  However, when I do, I like SEMRush - several different comparison charts and spreadsheets you can get including keywords they rank for (along with relevant data), organic visibility comparison (up to five sites in each chart and you can run through that for as many as you want), and other great data.

Here's a couple really good posts on Local SEO best practices that should answer your questions:

Guide to Google Places & Local Listings

How to Pimp Your Google Places Page for Better Rankings

I'm not going to go into the DA vs. PA issue. What I am going to do is focus on the issue Umar brings up.  That's much more of a concern than the "Science" of DA vs PA since those are really only a tiny consideration across a much broader number of ranking, authority, quality, relevance and trust factors for links from one site to another and not something you would even be able to figure out if you thought it mattered.

The risk of cross-linking the way you described on the other hand, is something that could risk both sites being penalized.  How much is the deal worth when considering what the harm would be if either, or both sites were penalized?

Gamble if you want. Just recognize the price paid for gambling that gets snagged in Google's spam trap.

Barry,

You're on a good point - it's a brand new "solution" to an age old "the search engines need help determining quality content" issue.  So it's far from polished.

On the other hand, we ARE talking about gambling sites, not necessarily the lions share of important mainstream sites depending on how you look at it. 

And I appreciate you saying it could be about the pain it'd be to implement.  I believe that's going to ensure a LOT of sites don't get it, which means, if I am correct, those that do will have a significant competitive advantage by mid next year.

LOL Dana,

I was going to mention Annie since she's the best in the business when it comes to tapping data in spreadsheets, but didn't know (or more likely didn't remember) she's got a Mozcon Presentation on the topic and didn't mention her because I didn't want to make it seem like I was promoting her business.  Yet she really is my own go-to resource for advanced spreadsheet work...

best info across the industry is that there's some loss of value in the transfer overall.  Also, just because a 301 takes place does not mean it will remain - Google will want to get additional confirmation over time that it's still as relevant as it had been before the 301.

EGOL,

As always, you infuse wisdom into this discussion.  I have always been an advocate of "content first, content last".  Yet in 2015, search engines are only one piece of the puzzle, and until and unless other efforts for brand visibility / authority / trust are made, the overwhelming majority of sites on the web will leave way too much money on the table.

I happen to believe links need to be generated through our own efforts yet it's not the "traditional" link building. Instead, it's more about advocacy of brand, community service, and participation in the community in which our prospective/existing clients/customers live.

If we are not active in those ways, we build a house on sand.

Just my take on it.

If it's a new phenomena, it's important to understand that Google will often temporarily rank sites higher based on initial evaluation.  Given that it's now in WordPress, that could have triggered this.  Over time, to remain in that ranking position, Google needs to obtain confirming signals.

If no new signals exist to confirm the current ranking, I suspect it will fall once again.

if it's been there for a while, then I'm at a loss for further insights. That great mysterious monster likes to confuse us this way.

Jarrett

There are potentially several other factors as well, beyond what you've already pointed to yourself.

Panda/Farmer issued in a new era where many old "rules" were tossed by the wayside.  Some of these were already questionable, as the seedlings of Panda were planted with last year's May Day update.  if any single site in your network saw significant drops but not the others, it might well have been something else that caused it.  Given the breadth and severity, this clearly does sound like Panda.

Taking a brief look at some of your content, site structure and duplicate content issues gives me even more confidence that's the cause.

Example 1:  Duplicate content severity

I randomly picked one article and searched Google.  Found a dozen sites where the same article shows up, including the site that's currently #1 in organic rankings in my result, which is the actual author's own site (Daniel Edward Craig).  http://www.google.com/search?q=In+this+post+I+discuss+how+newly+available+reputation+metrics+are+paving+the+way+for+the+integration+of+the+online+reputation+management+and+revenue+m&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

How many sites are in your network where you share the content?  So that begs the question - do you intend to find a way to give credit to the original news source for articles shared across sites?  That's a big recommendation.

Obviously just this factor alone shouldn't necessarily cause bottoming out.  News articles from major wire services routinely spread across the net in massive numbers every day.

Yet it's just one indicator to now consider.  Especially when considering other major factors.  Like the sheer volume of ads on pages.  Too many ads is a big factor now.  Amount of content that's unique to each site is a big part of the puzzle.  If most of the content is duplicated across all sites, what makes each site uniquely valuable?

I could go on, but those are some high level areas for consideration.

When you ask about the templatized repetitiveness, I need to wonder how much code exists underneath the visible content.  If there is an overwhelming ratio of code to on-page content, this can, by itself, negatively impact a site's uniqueness if there are dozens, hundreds, or thousands of identical templates, however it should be a minor concern if there's enough unique content specific to geo-location and individual site owner.

So for example, is geographic information included in every page title and within every page's content?  Are site owners able to include their own unique image alternate attribute text?  Is their address and contact info on every page?  Do they have their own Google Place pages (properly optimized, and pointing back to their site's contact page?  Or do they even also have Yelp, CitySearch, Bing Local or Yahoo local listings similarly set up?

All of these can help.

As far as the template repetition, if the rest of the above is all properly utilized, it shouldn't be a major problem, so I'd start looking at those considerations and go from there.

mreisbeck

In the Google Keyword Tool screen, below the "categories" choices, there's an option box on the left sidebar to choose broad, exact, phrase or a combination of those.

That being said, every situation is unique - so what Google reports as a low volume exact match may be highly valuable if the majority of people searching for that phrase do so in broad phrases or "long tail" phrases.  So don't be so quick to completely discount a phrase just from that data.  What do your visitor conversion statistics tell you? Call to action and conversion tracking data is vital in helping make the best decisions in this kind of situation.