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I understand your concern.

If I had the domain for a similar size town in the USA where I lived I would give it a shot.  In addition to directory pages I would have a lot of local content and it would grow over time.

I have a blog with over 150 active categories plus my persistent navigation on top of that - about 70 more links and outlinks in each of about 30 blog posts on every page.  It ranks great.  Great.  But it is a very healthy site with lots of spider activity.

Now, if you have a site with a huge number of links on the page, a huge number of pages and this site has very little power - then you are going to have a problem.  (big ecommerce sites come to mind)

A few extra links on a healthy site should not be a problem.  Check to see if your deep pages are getting into the index, staying in the index and have competitive strength.  If that checks out then don't worry.

If I search Google for unique sentences from these articles between quotation marks,  I see that the pages are in the Google index.   Also, the sentences are unique to your website.

So you are getting indexed and not being filtered because of duplicate content.

I only see seven linking root domains to your website, some are directories.  So, I don't think that your site has much power.

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On my sites, I notice google is quick to index new pages but those pages take a lot longer to develop good rankings.  They often start out very deep in the SERPs and climb slowly to where I would expect them to rank.   These are pages of substantive content (2000 words and six images) with PR6 and PR7 links into them from homepage and category pages.   I published an article in November, 2012 and it originally ranked at about position 150, then slowly moved up a few positions per week and finally entered the top 10 this week.  This is for a keyword with a difficulty of only 45%.

Marie is right.

I only looked at the article pages.

I am willing to bet big money that you have a Panda problem.

The thin content pages should be noindexed or removed until you have content for them.

I have a blog with 150 category pages and they pull in kickass traffic.  Lots of those pages bring in over 1000 visitors per month.

If you have long blog posts and display the first sentence or two on the category page that will not be duplicate content.    It is no different than a category page for an ecommerce store.  Category pages get out there and compete for serious traffic terms.

Lots of people say don't index them.   That's not what I have found and if I noindexed them I would be walking away from a lot of income and more traffic than is received by the rest of the blog combined.

I've put back the /news items as "noindex, follow" and as well as some internal links.

Yes.  I think that is an improvement.

ps. All of our external links are nofollow.

I didn't realize that.  Good idea on a blog where users can submit items.

pps. I had to put some disallow rules in our robots.txt to remove the news category and pages. I'm guessing i still have to keep those rules in place correct?

I allow the category pages on my blog to be indexed.  They bring in thousands of visitors per day.

Last question... would you also keep pagination as "noindex, follow" or open it all up?

On my sites the pagination is noindex follow.

A couple questions for you...

Do you receive a lot of user submitted news items?

Do you think that you get a lot of spam submissions?    How much time do you have to spend weeding the spam?

Thanks for sharing that.

I have thought about opening our news to visitor submissions.  Right now we do it all ourselves (about eight to ten items per day).

I worry that visitors will submit a lot of spam and self-promotion that will decrease our quality.   If weeding takes a few hours per day then we are better off doing it inhouse.

Thanks again for sharing.

Thanks for the comment.

I picked those words because so many people think that blogs are magic bullets and an extremely effective way to serve content..

Yes, they are efficient, but I don't believe that they are the most effective.

Anyone, such as you, who is thinking about using pages instead of a blog has the potential to move up to a superior way of presenting his content..  That is using your brain and your creativity to make a presentation that can be much more engaging for the visitor and much more effective at accomplishing your goals.

Most people just slap up the blog and don't think about the possibilities.  You are thinking about them and that is a good thing.

Maybe you will decide to use the blog to publish but build great presentation pages by hand.  Or maybe you will build great article pages and promote them with quick messages on the blog.  There are many ways to do this well and RSS feeds can be used with both.

Good luck.

I would look for someone who really knows Panda.  Here is a site owned by Marie Haynes, Moz member.

http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/panda/

If you have been hit by Panda you likely have duplicate content, which must be thrown away, noindexed or rewritten; or you have thin content which must be thrown away, noindexed or rewritten.   Do you have the gumption to throw away and do you have the time or money to do the rewrite?   If you get rid of all of the thin or duplicate content will you have anything left?

Bottom line.  If your whole site is thin and duplicate you need to start from scratch.  If you have some good content then you need to chop out enough of your site to get rid of the penalty.

Thanks.

I guess all of my pages are cornerstones.   Don't know why I would build anything else.  

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I do have some groups of pages like you describe.   They consist of..... One page that is narrowly optimized for a very difficult short-tail keyword (widgets) and that page links to supplemental pages on many related keywords (brass widgets, wooden widgets, plastic widgets, etc).

My page for the root keyword links to all of the supplemental pages, and all of the supplemental pages link back to the root keyword page.  There links appear two places.  1) in the bread crumbs; and 2) in the paragraph text of the page.

I have had great results with these pages.  My root page will have paragraphs and photos for every supplemental page topic... then the supplemental pages have extended content on that topic and lots more images.

Comment...  I stopped thinking about linkjuice a long time ago.  I don't regret it.

1) What do you think of this practice?

If I was the boss at Google we would go after these sites and get rid of them.  They are huge huge time wasters.

I live in a small community and most of the physicians are either working at large practices or institutions.  They often  don't have a webpage for each staff member.  So these sites spew out optimized pages for [ physician's name ] + [ city, state ] just to slap your face with ads or sell the physican a place to advertise.  They rarely have the information that you need.

2) Does the quality of these types of landing pages factor into your assessment? In other words, if the pages aren't thin or duplicate, do they have value?

The quality usually sucks.  Think about it... if they are blasting out hundreds of thousands of pages for every city and state they are probably going to be cookie cutter pages or they are going to have $2/page writers blathering nonsense.

These pages waste my time.  Furthermore, the people who run these sites call on the phone and bug me because they are either: A) trying to get content for their website; or, B) they want to sell me my page on their website.     I don't want a page on their spammy site!   And, They want stoooopid amounts of money.

3) Is this a practice you would recommend to a national, virtual company? If not, what would you recommend?

For some people, professional spam is a business model.  I don't recommend it but I understand why they are doing it.  Still if I was the boss at Google we would be running physicians' names and toasting any sites that are trying to get traffic by republishing a page with every physician on the continent that is mashed up with a bunch of spam.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Professional Spammers of the worst level

Look here how the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a well-known and otherwise respected newspaper is in the business of professional spam.     They are using their domain authority to fill the SERPs with crap.  Type in the name of a biz near you and they probably have a spam page about it.  They just have the name, address and phone of the biz.. and maybe, maybe not, have a few details scraped from their website.

Keep in mind that many shopping carts have "buy buttons" and "purchase links" that can be embedded in .pdf documents and will deliver the visitor (and the item) into the shopping cart when clicked.

Do you suggest we keep the site navigation link to the blog in its current location or move it some place else in the footer or in the header?

If they are proud of this blog and want people to read it then it should have a link that is slappin' the visitors' face.

The bounce rate for the blog is over 81%. What is a reasonable goal for a bounce rate for a blog on a business website? What are some tactics to improve the bounce rate?

The best way to reduce the bounce rate is to give the visitor something juicy to click.

If you want people to read a second article then featuring the best posts that your visitors will want to see, in a way that visually stands out and mentally speaks to the visitor.

I would get rid of the wordcloud and change the category names to something more meaningful.  For example: "Church"... I would make it "Church Accounting"..... "Payroll" would be "NonProfit Payroll".  In the content manager I would change the visible title tag for this to "Church Accounting Software" and "NonProfit Payroll Accounting and Software".... Right now your title tags are simply "church" and "payroll".  Add more detail to compete for better traffic.

The blog also need some visual appeal.  I would change that tiny gray font to something larger, blue and clickable - put more space between the lines to make them more readable.

Do you suggest including a call to action to sign up for a free trial on the blog home page and/or individual posts?

Yes.  And, a sign-up for people who want to receive an email message when a new blog post is published.

Do these guys get lots of questions about the software?  If they do then "tips" might be good subject matter for the blog.

My response here is not an answer to your question.  It is a starting point for a possible brain  storming session with the client.

I really like Alan's answer.

I think that the three questions one must ask are...

Q1: Why are you writing?

Q2: What is the content quality?

Q3: Why are you linking?

A1: On my site I am writing because I have something to say that I genuinely believe that people want to know and should read. I am also doing a lot of writing because I know that there is search volume for the content. I am trying to produce a quality content resource for the visitor. I am not blathering.

A2: My goal is to produce several hundred to a few thousand words of content with several great photos, interesting graphs, attractive graphics and tabulated data. Before I write, I make sure that I am going to produce content that will be one of the best pages on the web for that topic. It is high quality content deliberately produced because people are searching for it. I am not blathering just to get a page up. This content can take several days per page to produce.

A3: When I link, I am linking to additional information that the reader might want. Often that content is on my own website and for that my links are similar to the in-content links on wikipedia - where a keyword links to another page on my site that matches the topic perfectly. I also often link to several other pages on websites that I don't own and those links are going to content that is superior to mine in some way. Again like wikipedia.

If you are writing and linking with a purpose then you might be doing well. You can assess that by determining if visitors are "liking" or "sharing" your content. If that is happening then you are doing fine. If that is not happening then maybe you are blathering because you want to put links in the content. If that is the case I would post less often and post higher quality. It will be a greater bang for the buck.

I use all EMDs and have spent good money to obtain them.  I believe that they compete better if you place good content on them.  In my opinion they convert better and are easier remembered by your visitors.

It is really hard to create a brand if you are competing nationally or globally, however, an EMD can make it easier for you to be remembered, in my opinion.

A lot of people think that EMDs are penalized.  In my opinion that is BS.  They still give some advantage if you have the Exact Match Domain and not a partial match or an exact match and a word.  If I thought that EMDs were penalized or any disadvantage I would be out of them, instead they are kicking butts.

Most important, the EMD gives me mental energy to work on the site.  If I have that the competition is in trouble.

I think that you are going to get a lot of "opinions" on this question.

a few years ago he is quoted to have said how Google was going to crack down on EMD's

Matt did say that and Google did do that.  But they mainly hit EMDs that had crap content.  EMDs that had robust content were not really hurt.  The value of the EMD might have been diminished a bit but they are still slightly favored.

Slightly favored means that they will rank well in low competition with few links, however, against major competition the advantage is very small.  They still have to earn their position.

I think to myself, as long as I get a good social, link, and content profile, I am going to compete with them.

If they have any strength at all that will not happen.  I advocate EMDs but not for that reason.  If you think you can buy an EMD and loaf, you will be disappointed.

garagebuildercolorado.com

I think that domain sounds spammy.  Very few people are going to type "garage builder colorado" into search.  That is the exact match.  What will it get you?  Sounds like somebody talking who doesn't know proper English.  I would not use it.  It sounds like a spammy domain and not the domain of a business.

I would use ColoradoGarageBuilders.com if I owned a business that lived up to that name by building garages all over Colorado.  buildergaragescolorado and garagebuildercolorado are domains registered because somebody wants to stuff keywords.  Just my two cents and personal opinions.

I'm just a small local company trying to survive.

If this is the case... if you get most of your business from a certain city then you should be putting your time and brains and effort into local search.

** if a company has facebook likes, twitter posts, great backlink profile and content, then you should be able to go by whatever domain I would think?**

You have to beat your competitors by having a stronger web presence.  The domain is only part of it or maybe none of it.  Right now if people know you by our name and you plan to remain a small local company then your name might be a better choice of domain... like EgolsConstruction.com.    I might not use that (or ColoradoGarageBuilders.com) if I was a younger person because I might decide to build homes or barns or do paving someday... and people who want those services might say.... :"EgolsGarages.com"...  don't get them, they can build garages but would probably screw up building a house.  Keyword domains can be very limiting.

I know a guy who does roofing in my community who has no web presence, does not advertise, does not give estimates, doesn't even have a truck with his name on it and he is flooded with work because he has been in business a long time and has done great work and everybody knows him.

The sign of an established business is a good reputation and immediate access to lots of work.  You don't even need a website, in fact it might cause phone calls and queries that eat your time.

But its hard to know what is right and what is wrong. For years a phone book is all we needed, now we want to be found.

I understand.  When I was starting out I spent a lot of time reading the basics of SEO.  Moz has lots of resources for people who are learning.  You can read the beginner's guide and ask questions here.  It is also a good idea to record the changes that you make on your site, what works, what doesn't and use that as a source of learning.

The most valuable thing that I did was to start a site and then hire an experienced person to do a study and review.  That person spend a couple hours learning about my business, looking at my website and then gave me an opinion of what I might do.  That kept me going down the right road.  Still, now, after about ten years and a nice amount of experience, I am still working on websites and still getting paid advice from people who are smarter than me and people who think differently than me and people who know how to do technical work that I don't want to spend time learning.  I do 98% of the work myself but smarts, opinions and tech savvy from others are very important.

You mentioned that you changed your URLs.   Did you do 301 redirects to the new URLs to preserve the rankings and power?

If I grab old URLs of your site from archive.org and copy/paste them into a browser most of them are hitting 404 pages.

Also seeing duplicate content on the mybigcommerce

I believe our old, previous store has been taken down by Homestead.

So, if you left Homestead and they have shut down the service that you had there... then you will need to have an htaccess file on your current host that lists all of the Homestead URLs and 301 redirects every one of them to equivalent URLs on your BigCommerce site.  Without that the traffic flow from Homestead will be cut off and the powerflow will evaporate.