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Nobody knows for sure but I am betting that diminishing returns begin at about the second link.

However, if you are getting links from the Pope's site then you can probably get an awful lot of them before the value depletes to a really low level.

Are these doorway pages?

Doorway pages are a cluster of very similar, low-effort required pages that are produced for no reason other than to generate search traffic.

I don't think that you are going to get a rock solid answer.  In my opinion, you will only get opinions unless Google is giving an official answer.

In my opinion, what you describe are ARE doorway pages.  They are a little better than "cookie cutter pages" that simply swap the name, address, phone, etc. in and out between pages,  Google has been killing cookie cutter pages for at least ten years, though some have survived for at least that long.

The pages that you describe have a higher chance of survival but if anyone was going to produce a massive number of these pages they would start taking conscious or unconscious short-cuts that would probably make them moderately vulnerable to an algorithmic penalty.

If you want to do a good job on these pages.  Get the manager at each location to take a photo of the building, take a photo of the staff, write text about the physical location with a google map, write a little about the staff including their names, describe some of the jobs done in that area, include photos of their work if possible.  Hold their annual bonus until they hand in this work.  Hold next year's and each subsequent year's until they have a fresh update.

I like this question....

Yes, I have seen it.... you can create this condition by smart title tag writing.

• You are out-ranked by the publisher, who you will probably never beat, but you entice more clicks by shouting a kickass price in your title tag.

• Your title tag shouts some great value proposition such as FREE Shipping, FAST delivery.

• Your title tag is simply more sexy by use of the words... "Secret Method.....     Kickass Results.....   or..... Free BEER

These might not work for piano movers but for small professional office here are some low-hanging fruits that I can think of for links.

- landlord (some brag about their tenants)

- chamber of commerce (often link to members, write blog post, become an officer for profile link)

- community directories (they feature local businesses, write blog post)

- professional associations (link to members, write blog post, become an officer for profile link)

- clients (write a blog post for them)

- suppliers (often link to local product vendors/customers or write blog post for them)

- professional schools (often link to successful grads, write blog post)

- license boards (link to licensees, write blog post)

- other local businesses with synergy (write blog post, become one of their "recommended")

- local newspapers (write article for online edition)

- local BBB (get in directory, write blog post)

- write for professional journal online edition

- local city government/organizations (directory, blogs, supporters, volunteers)

Sounds like a smart client to me.

What have you done for him lately?

Just send a spreadsheet with the URLs where his links are located.  Easy.

If they are links on sites that he respects then he will love it.

If they are crap comments on forums that make him look like a fool then he will not like it.

trying to be humorous here... read with a smile on your face

People who own popular blogs get a lot of requests from "marketers" who are trying to place a link, a shout out, a mention or any other form of detritus that connects to their website on that popular blog.  Usually these people are simply trying to mooch on the bloggers popularity and effort.

Occasionally the marketer will offer a blog post or some other type of content that is usually among the worst   chest-thumping grammatically-incorrect crap that the blogger has ever seen, mentioning the product or the website at least once in every sentence surrounded by superlatives that are typically misspelled... and if the blogger does a search he finds this detritus has already been published on at least a hundred other low-quality websites.

Very rarely the blogger receives a genuine gift of content that will not stink up his blog and that he is actually willing to publish.  These rarely come from marketers and usually come from people who simply have a message that they want to spread.

So, if you have genuine, unique, substantive and informative content that the blogger enjoys and is motivated to share with his visitors you have a chance of seeing it published on a high quality website.  If that happens the blogger or webmaster will certainly be  open to future messages from you and be receptive to additional gifts of  genuine, unique, substantive and informative content.

.... oh... one more thing... be really careful if you are going  to hire a PR company to help you with this... The blogger knows that most of them are nothing more than spammers and their messages generally have a higher density of crap than is allowed by law.  There are a few exceptions to this rule.    

(this question could start an argument!)

In my opinion they should be the same.

When your title appears in the SERPs that is what visitors are expecting - so give it to them.

The directive is to take our Website from a PR3 site to a PR5....in 6 months.

I know a couple SEOs outside of the USA who got directives like that because the boss wanted to start selling a few links.  

But, if you are in the USA, this sounds like a directive from a person who really likes bling... wears big gaudy rings... who thinks that size is everything... and who likes to pull out a fat wallet at the store... drives big fancy cars...  and...   maybe has hair like Donald Trump.    

Now if you are working at a place like that then you better get busy on raisin' the PR... and lookin' for another job.

If you are in a biz niche where most of the sites are very low PR then you are going to be stuck buying links to pull this off.   There I would look for another job first and then worry about the PR.

How comfortable are you asking the boss if he would prefer an increase of PR from 3 to 5 or if he would prefer an nice increase in your profits?  A company can spend a lot of resources raising the PR...

This boss might think that PR is the secret to SEO and that you are not workin' on it.

If I was comfortable asking questions I would go in and say...  I can work on a limited number of the following over the next six months...  tell me where you want me to spend my time....

--- improve conversion rate

--- bring in more traffic

--- make site look better to improve corp image and maybe improve conversion

--- get us ranking for new product lines

These things hit our bottom line....

I can also work on.....

--- solving tech issues that could damage our rankings

--- work on thin/dupe content issues that could damage our rankings

These things reduce risk.  We don't want 50% of traffic to disappear.

Or, I can do the following that will increase our PR - fast - like in six months (PR is a log scale - yaknow)

--- buy some links

--- rent some links

These things might increase our PR and have other unintended benefits.

You're the boss.  Tell me what you want me workin' on.

They should have stopped yesterday.

Shoot the linkbuilder immediately.

I usually am the one who says... "attack with content"... but weight loss is a niche that has been very very heavily written about by people who have outstanding reputations and by people who don't have a reputation but know how to hype.

Even if you create "amazing contents"  in this niche it is going to be like whispering under the din of an atomic blast.

So, if you are going to stand out in this niche you really gotta know an awful lot about this subject and know how to pitch it to people or you must hire someone with a name who can attract a following to your site.

I think the probability of one of those happening is low.... and the price of attacking with pedestrian content in this niche is failure.

So, I would set my sights on a different target (unless weight loss is a nascent niche in your target geography).

And is it really that necessary to write meta descriptions?

Your boss is a marketing man?

I can't imagine a marketing man who is willing to give up control of the sales pitch.

He needs a kick in the pants. 

Why are we paying him... just let google do it.

However since we are using a product datafeed and send it to amazon and google, they use our product descriptions too.

• spits coffee *

Whoa!  I would not do that.  I would remove or replace those descriptions on Amazon if at all possible.

When you sell on Amazon, any content, any image, any anything that you put on their site will be used against you.  And, if you strike gold there then Amazon will quickly become your competitor.

This is exactly why I don't sell on amazon.  They solicit me a couple times a year to sell my stuff on their site.  No way.  I did that in the past and my work benefited Amazon more than it benefited me and benefited my competitors too.

I always wait couple of days until google crawl our product pages before i send recently added products to amazon or google. I believe if google crawls our product page first, we will be the owner of the content? Am i right? If not i believe amazon is taking advantage of my original content.

This is not true.  I don't care who says this is true, I am going to argue.  No way.  I'll argue with anybody about this.  Even the big names at Google.  They do a horrible job at attributing first publisher.  Horrible.  Horrible.

I have published a lot of content given to me by others.  Other people have stolen my content.  I can tell you with assurance that the powerful often wins... and if a LOT of people have grabbed your content you can lose to a ton of weak sites.

Google does not honor first publisher.   They honor powerful publishers - like Amazon.   Giving content to Amazon that you are going to publish on your website is feeding the snake!

So google thought that we have a shallow or duplicated content and dropped our rankings?

If your content is on Amazon, they are probably taking your traffic.  Go out and look at the SERPs.

I used to have lots of microsites, then built one big site that beat all of them.

Google search results pit page-against-page with the overall strength of the site also counting towards the rankings.  So, it is better to attack with one battleship instead of ten potato guns.

If they want to be found for "chocolate fudge cake" and "chocolate eclairs" then their work needs to begin with a dedicated page for each of those topics.  Those dedicated pages will need to be very high quality compared to what is already out there and that just the start of what is needed.

These are moderately difficult queries.

If you go to the SERPs for "chocolate fudge cake" you will see some formidable competition - FoodNetwork, Nigella, About,com, Food.com, Epicurious and lots of other important domains are there already and some of them have been there for ten years or more.   New content on these subjects is being added to other websites every month so ranking in these SERPs will be challenging and elusive.

To rank quickly, you need great content on an strong and established domain.  If you have a new site, a weak site, a tiny site, or a just a "not very well known site", then ranking for these queries is going to take time and a lot of work spent promoting the site and its content.  That means publishing content that is immediately impressive to the visitor, linkworthy and highly sharable.  Then it will need to be promoted to get it noticed by people who will share it, like it, link to it.

An unestablished site in these SERPs could spend a year or two or more of weekly publishing and promoting just to begin getting traction in these SERPs - because there are so many well established sites and a large number more that are hoping to "make it".

If you want the campaign domain to appear in the search results then you must remove the 301 redirect and allow it to appear in the SERPs.

Google really isn't "correcting" anything.  This company has sacrificed the brand of their campaign by allowing that domain to be  301ed to their primary website.  This happens on the server, not in Google.  Google is obediently following instructions.

This law firm wants to be know as SimpleToSpell.com but they don't want to give up SchwempleToSchpell.com

Just a thought... it is very possible that their new domain will have a lot of competition in the SERPs.  I bet it would be pretty hard to rank for something like "simple to spell".... and they will be pissed if they redirect to this new and simple domain and rank at #13 for their brand.   So, if they have future plans of using this domain they better get a website on it and start putting some work into it.  Get your feet onto the turf and see how it works.

Great.  Share a link to it here.  I'd like to read it.

Be sure that you share a link to the unspun version.

Visitors often copy and paste my content and post it elsewhere...

Congratulations!   You must have great content!

... but they don't link to me.

Those weasels!

This happens with my content a lot.  It makes me mad.

How does Google treat this duplicated content?

They claim that they know where the content originated, but they are either overestimatin' their abilities or just lyin' about them.   Some people will argue in Google's favor but they don't know what they are talkin' about.  (If you are one of these people, I'll not argue with you, you can keep belivin' it.  I know I am right.)

What is the best way to handle it? File DCMA claims or ask them for a link?

These weasels probably don't have public whois and no contact info on their website.  If they do have contact info on their website it is probably phony.

If you can send them a message (and a human reads it) the message will probably be ignored, maybe even laughed at.  If you get a reply it will probably be the verbal equivalent of being flipped off.  Some people just don't understand copyright.  Some people understand copyright or are located where they can abuse the copyright of people in your country.  They have built a business out of stealing your content and mine.  They often have thousands of websites with your content and mine. They are making tons of munny.

If you file a DCMA, you better have absolute knowledge that the content truly belongs to you and that they are not displaying it under a valid "fair use", because they can sue you if you play this the wrong way.

The remaining people who steal your content, just don't know that they are stealing.  They think that anything on the web is fair game.  A lot of the stolen content is on legit websites.  They hired an SEO who hired someone else, in a country where copyright is not thought about, and they grabbed your content, slapped it on somebody's website and said that they wrote it just for the client.

Good luck.  Be careful.  Find a way to keep the blood pressure down.  Buy a punchin' bag.    My experience is, chasing weasels only gets you tired, most of them are only out after dark and you will never find them.

So, you can see that I think that this is harmful and it is really hard to do anything about it.

ADDED:  Got so busy in my rant I forgot to answer....

How does this affect ranking?

If you have a healthy, vigorous site, having a few pieces of stolen content on other websites will probably not hurt you if they are weak websites.  However, it can tank your rankings if the content is on strong websites - stronger than yours.  Also, it can kill your rankings if it is on lots of weak websites.

Examples:

I was selling some products that were made in China.  My content got grabbed by hundreds of Chinese websites publishing in English.  My rankings tanked.  Tanked.  The result was that I gave thousands of dollars worth of outdoor gear to Goodwill.

I had several articles about commodities (like what is traded on exchanges).  They ranked in the top three of google for searches on those commodities.  Tens of thousands (I am not joking) of spam commodities websites grabbed my articles or pieces of my articles and republished them.  My articles disappeared from google even though I had held those great rankings for a couple of years and they were on PR6 pages.  Fortunately, they have recently returned to good rankings and I am making money from them again but lost great revenue for a couple of years.

When considering on page / on site seo what process do you use / take to evaluate how much content is needed to be competitive and rank well?

I go out to the SERPs where I want to rank and look at the quality of their content.  Then I make a page that is better, a page that blows them out of the water.

The answer is not in the number of pages.   Instead it is the quality of the single page for that search term.  It usually requires a very substantive page to defeat what is at the top of the SERPs.  Lots of easy-to-understand text, photos, tables of data, graphs, mabye a video.  You can beat tough competition for difficult keywords with one page like that.

A nice gem is more interesting to people than a ton of crap.

If you have a blog post that has been historically popular, the best practice would be to do some research and significantly improve the old blog post or completely rewrite it if that is what needs to be done.

Quality usually has a bigger impact than freshness.

Heydarian, great to see you here.

This is a complex question.  The answer of what to index and what to not index varies from situation to situation.

Let me give you examples and a little history for two sites...

**BLOG A ** (an industry news filter, kinda like Metafilter for an industry)

The site that I spend most of my time on has a blog that receives very skimpy posts.  "You gotta see this widget".  "This widget is really cool".   "Acme invents a new green widget".   Three years ago, I had post pages, category pages and a home page that all received lots of traffic.   Then, after Panda, those skimpy post pages did not perform well and actually damaged the rankings for the entire site - because I had thousands of them.  So, I noindexed all of the post pages and even deleted thousands of them a couple times per year because they were mostly "newsy" content.  The category pages and homepage still received lots of traffic and the rankings for the rest of the site recovered nicely.

Then, I think google started looking at category pages that link to skimpy content pages and they started performing poorly.  So, I changed the blog format to eliminate the post pages and the category pages.  Now there is only a big homepage and pagination pages.  This blog still is very successful because lots of people continue to visit it directly and subscribe to the feed - but I intentionally abandoned the post pages and category pages because Google has changed.

BLOG B (a product blog for a retail website)

On this blog the posts are detailed product reviews, detailed descriptions of how to do something, detailed quashes of misconceptions, etc.  Each post has several photos and 500 to 2000 words.  At first I was using about ten category pages, but after a couple years they still were not getting much traffic.  Other pages of my site (not on the blog) competed with them and performed more strongly.  So, I deleted the category pages from the blog,  HOWEVER,  I began to generously link to the topic pages on other parts of the website.  The results have been positive.

So, the bottom line.  I think that you have to look at many things:

1. Are your category pages pulling in traffic?  If not, delete them, don't just noindex them unless lots of people are reading them.  They are power sinks if you still have them on your site IMO.

2. Do you have superior pages on your site for the same topic?  If you do, then give them your attention and promote them on your blog posts.

3. How does google treat pages like yours?

Then you gotta place your bets on a strategy.  Hope that it works.  Keep watching the analytics.

Good luck.