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If the owner isn't already actively blogging and been doing so for some time (meaning that he likes doing it, is accustomed to taking the time to do it, and is likely to continue doing it for a good deal of time into the future), hire a writer/ghost writer, instead. Map out an editorial calendar based on the kinds of content that will be acceptable to the highest quality sites you're able to get articles published on have the owner add a bunch of expert bullet points under each article topic and have the writer go at it.  This way, your effort will be much more sustainable.

Howard, If the page isn't of importance to you, yes, you could just remove the page.  You could also change the url of the page and let all of those links unresolved.  If the links are not targeting a live page on your domain they won't have an impact on your domain.

I've engaged with local marketing companies who had big plans for bringing in nationwide leads and had little care for developing their firm's local relevance. Nor did they have an understanding of the difference in difficulty for a small marketing company to convert local leads into new business vs. converting geographically diverse leads (which they struggled to get anyway).

As a small marketing company, the sweet spot is definitely local business and no doubt, in Greenville NC, there is more business than you can handle. There are so many ways to develop content that will put your firm directly in view of local businesses that need you and that will pay for your services. It requires an embrace of your locality and a creative exuberance for content about it and forgoing thoughts of leads coming in from all corners of the country. If you do those things well first, leads will come from other places.

You say you write blog posts about industry topics and trends. As I'm sure you've noticed, so does almost everyone else, right? Why not get creative in combining marketing topics with the life and times of the typical Greenvillian? I guarantee you will enjoy the writing much more and your traffic will start coming in from closer to home.

Your requirements seem to be a moving target--a writer of their own stuff, an editor of your stuff, a technical writer, a slogan writer, industry expert, a marketing expert, a voice over "chick", an SEO expert, and a multi-media expert.

I think that if you're having a hard time identifying the skill set you need, you're going to end up spending a lot of money for content that doesn't take your site where you are hoping it to go.    First and foremost, you have to be the expert at determining what you need. You can't ask the content creator to carry the burden of making your site successful and expect to pay them minimum wage. It is just not a realistic goal.

In your case, in order to more specifically identify and express your needs and requirements I'd recommend spending extensive time examining your competition and their websites.  Ex-ten-sive. Ex-haus-tive. Until you're blue in the face.  Being the detail oriented person that you are, write down the ten needs your product/service satisfies for your target customer and then research how each of your competitors products/service meet those needs and what elements of their websites help or hinder them in that process.  Recognize how they describe features and how they describe benefits.  Research how and where your target audience is discussing such products/services and spend time reading those discussions.  The more time you spend in this phase the better your content is going to be and if that content turns out not not to be successful, you'll likely have to admit to yourself that you didn't spend sufficient  time on this exercise.

Once you have more objective thoughts on what you need, your next stop may be over to slogan slingers where you're be able to articulate your requirements and have a bunch of people compete to craft a slogan for you.  Then, perhaps, you can go to elance or craigslist where you can look for an industry expert who's also a professional writer, pay that needle-in-a-haystack exactly the rate they're asking for because you're going to demand a lot from them yet you'll be able to give them clear guidance on the deliverable they're creating--and they'll thank you for that and you'll be satisfied with the result.

Not that they're likely to hurt you--or help you, for that matter--but if enough people disavow worthless sites like these, maybe we won't have to spend time wondering about them as we go through our link audits because they'll have been wiped off the map.

Llanero,

I was going to write a long list of reasons why you shouldn't do this but  there are so many posts out there on the topic, I'm just going to say it's a horrible plan.  Rather than looking for someone to build links for you, you're better off looking for someone to help you write content that is going to make a positive difference in your marketing.

Well Tristram, you have to put your efforts into context with the competitors who are filling the search results between where your search result is and the ones on the first page of the search results and then you have to think about how much money there is to be made by those who are at the top of the results.

Considering there are only 10 places available on page-one and there's probably decent money to be made for those who show up on that page, it's likely the folks at the top have put in somewhat greater effort than it takes to get a number of back links and mentioning their keywords in content and meta tags. It's also likely that the folks on page-two and three have put in somewhat greater effort in their attempt to get to page-one.  Likewise, those folks one page 4 and 5 have probably been plugging away at it for quite some time, as well, and recognize that it's all about how much time, effort and organic search marketing know-how you apply that gets you to your goal.

While there is no tried and true formula for reaching the top of the results, the basics can be found here.  But remember, it's not about just doing what Google wants you to do, it's about doing what Google wants you to do better than all your competitors. That means you first have to know what Google wants, then you have to recognize how well your competitors are doing it.  In the end, you have to make a decision on whether you have what it takes to go toe to toe with your keyword competitors or if you should choose a different strategy.

Remember Madlena, everyone says "It's all about good content" but what it's really all about is the social engagement that happens when good content reaches the right audience.  If you're not spending as much time working to get your content in front of the site's specific audience as you are writing the articles, you'll not achieve the results you're looking for out of that that content.

Dave, you can use a tool like  ScreamingFrog or Xenu's Lunk Sleuth to find links pointing to the 404 pages. You can leave the pages to 404 unless you can see in your stats that search was sending you traffic to those pages or you have external links going to them--in that case you'll want to 301 them.

OK--that's an accordion.  You're good.

So long as you can see the text in the source code, you're usually in good shape.

Jonathan,

If you noindex, follow them, link juice will pass from upstream links through to the downstream links but if you nofollow them, it won't.

This thread goes into some detail on the same topic http://moz.com/community/q/how-google-treat-internal-links-with-rel-nofollow

Rand wrote a pretty thorough guide on the fundamentals of PR sculpting you might want to check out: http://moz.com/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow

Romanbond,

This is thin content/Panda kind of stuff. If your users find it valuable and outside sources link to your abstract pages, it could pass muster.  It's likely though, that those pages will not build up the authority that they need to either rank well themselves or pass along link equity to those pages they link to.

Don't put the link on all the pages.  Put a link on the home page and on a few on other popular pages on the wordpress site and leave it at that.

404 errors will usually mean that there are active links to pages on your site that don't exist.  You need to find those links using OSE or a tool like screamingfrog and then you need to remove or revise those links.

Duplicate content--add a rel=canonical tag to the header of the www.abc.fr/signup.php page that shows that it is the canonical version. The duplicate versions will then carry the same tag, indicating that the original is the canonical version of the content.  While that's a good practice for the search engines, it won't stop those pages from showing up in Moz's reports as duplicates--they will continue to show up as dupes if they get crawled.

Becca,

That wouldn't be too strange if it's very new and since you say that you're building it, I assume that it is. If it's older than a couple of months, it would be strange.  Getting some links and some social media activity going for it would probably work to stabilize things for you.

Juan Miguel,

If your competition for a pair of similar keyword is low enough or your content is strong enough, you can optimize a single page for both keywords.  If the terms are not similar, or there is substantial competition for either or both terms, it may be difficult or impossible to get both to rank.

Often, it's best to focus the content of each page on a single concept that is highly relevant to the keyword you are trying to optimize for.

There may be slightly more reason to lean towards using subdirectories but each case is different.  Have you looked these over yet:

• International SEO: Where to Host and How to Target - Whiteboard Friday - Moz
• content posted under different TLDs a problem? - YouTube

On the one hand, I think every site has some number of questionable links pointing to them, so disavowing all questionable shouldn't be a primary goal.  On the other hands, if it's a free directory and not really human edited, I'd ditch it. If it's a free directory and it's niche and it's well edited, I'd keep it. If its a paid directory and it's "reviewed" I'd think about keeping it. If it's a paid and well edited, I'd keep it.

Considering it's not actually £300, it's  £300 per year, or, at least it used to be, I don't believe there's value in it.  Since the Mid 2000's, I've felt that Yahoo has traded on it's name as far as that service goes, not on the actual value  that it provides its customers.  Don't expect much in the way of visitor traffic from the listing and don't expect much algorithmic value from it.

Graham,

I think you're talking about the Mozscape API.  If that's the case, you can generate your API credentials here: http://moz.com/products/api/keys