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These are just opinions.....

I see some people who offer SEO services for hire asking questions that share the websites of their clients.   I don't think that they should post those in public.

I see some people who offer SEO services for hire asking some really noob questions.  It's good that they are looking for eduction but probably best to take those private or hire a consultant.

Not a good idea to post the URL of your money site here or affiliate sites in low barrier to entry niches.

Sometimes I post a private question because I am looking for one reply that I think I would trust rather than opening a discussion and getting replies from people I don't know.  I envision that difficult questions going to the "back room" are routed to appropriate people to answer rather than anybody opening them and "shooting from the hip" with an answer.  I get replies from people like Dr Pete which is nice.

Low IQ.

This question resonates with me..... 

This is a matter of personal opinion... and the opinion of people associated with THE BRAND are often adamant about how their name is used.

To me, making such a show about the brand is like chest thumping.  I often grin when I see it.   I would never put that stuff on my site.  I would rather have my brand recognized by the quality of my service and my product - and put my energy into that.  If I have quality services and products I don't need to make that kind of noise.

But I have experience with a couple of employers who are all about THEIR BIGASS BRAND and if you are on their team you better be SHOUTING about it and liking it (or pretending to like it).   Because if the boss gets a whiff that you ain't all about THE BRAND then you better be lookin' for another job.

So, I think its a good idea to see how deep their commitment is to THE BRAND.  If it is dyed-in-the-wool you better start likin' it or leave.  But, if they are open minded you might be able to help them evolve from chest thumping to a more professional communication style  - in some people's opinion. 

Product A exists for years and nobody is sayin' anything about it.  Then, BAM, a ton of crappy reviews appear on a bunch of crappy sites..... Somebody did somethin' to make that happen - especially when those reviews appear on sites that do not make a practice of reviewing products.   Engineers not required.

Just opinion... If you want content hire a genuine content writer.... if you want reviews then ask your customers instead of getting "pot luck" from MT.... your customers are smarter than you think... they will be able to smell the phony Turker BS.

...but no matter what we do we just can't bump them out of the top position.

What are  you doing?  Maybe your methods are ineffective?

Recently we discovered that they have 7 or so .org sites set up claiming to be run by volunteers and their opinions are un-biased that "highly recommend" products from the main site's company.

If this was my competitor I would be thankful that the volunteers are not being put to better use.

Anyone know any other way to report things like this to Google?

What rule of Google have they broken?  KW's in the URL and getting volunteers to work on .org sites are not against any google rule.   So, reporting them will  not accomplish anything.   Maybe your client can purchase a new KW domain and get enthusiastic volunteers to write awesome blog posts, become active posters in a kickass forum or produce other great content that is all hosted on his/her primary domain?

Tell us more about your site and the methods you are using.  Maybe you will get some great ideas for strengthening your site.

I agree with Matt on the quick search and then post with confidence.  If we have answered the same question before we will link to that previous question.

Sometimes, when a topic comes up a second time, additional people will contribute even more valuable information from their own experience or recent announcements by Google or articles on trusted websites.

Over 95% of my revenue comes from organic search

Yay!   Nice work!   You are one of the few remaining businesses who are able to do this.

My ROI on AdWords is roughly zero.

Me too.  I just did yet another experiment to convince myself that it is almost impossible for a small biz, a retail reseller, to make good money, even any money, using Adwords.

My question is: if I pause all of my AdWords campaigns, is there ANY chance that my organic rankings (and organic click-through rates) will suffer?

My opinion on this is "NO".   I would turn them off with confidence.  I think that you will still get some of the sales that are currently coming in through Adwords.

First, could Google retaliate to my reduced ad spending by dropping my rankings?

I don't think that they will do this.  I don't think that Google is vindictive in this way.  Several years ago we used to run Adwords quite a bit.  We would turn the ads on and off for employee vacations, sick days, and when our retail stock was low.   Organic rankings never changed a bit.

Second, will searchers think differently about my organic link if they don't also see the accompanying paid link on the SERP?

I doubt it.  I think that lots of searchers skip over the ads.  Any searcher who runs ad blockers probably skips over the ads while cursing.   I think that dropping Adwords might increase the profit margin of your business  because it was probably depressing the profit margin while you were paying for the ads.

I think you are a smart guy because you have done the math to figure this out.  Most people who run Adwords are blissfully losing their shirts and pants.

I write on SEO forums as a hobby but my serious work goes exclusively to a couple of websites that I own.

I don't give any of that work away. It's too valuable.

If you think that you have what it takes to be a "thought leader" then that stuff should remain on your own website unless the place where you publish it has an absolutely enormous audience, and then you still have even better content on your domain for anyone who goes there.

Work to build your own audience instead of feeding the audience of another website.  It will be really slow going at first but as you gain momentum things will start chugging along at a faster rate.

Going back to that "thought leadership".... if you truly have that a lot of other people will want it and they will come to your webssite to get it.  If it is really that good and a few people find it they will tweet about it, share it, like it, link to it.... if you really have that just publishing it can be like throwing gasoline on a fire.

Lots of people think that they gotta give their content away.  They need to have the courage not to do that... or at least only do that in rare situations where they can get enormous bang in front of just the right people - and then only do that with a small fraction of their treasure.

Before you launch a new website be sure that all of your major on-page optimization elements are in place.

These are things like <title><h1> <h2> alt= breadcrumbs and anything else that you have used to optimize your pages.</p> <p>It sounds like you have been careful and have done things to kick your optimization up a notch.</p> <p>If your design improves the visitor experience your rankings should go up as your rate of earning tweets, likes links, etc increases.</p> <p>Toss it up and Good Luck.</p> <p> </p> <p> </p></title>

You also have a duplicate content problem...

Rewrite original and much more substantive product descriptions.

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Your title tag is a keyword dump...

Mobility Scooter | Scooters | Scooter | Power Scooter | American Scooter | Mobility

Pick one or two keywords that are very important to you and  write a title tag that will elicit clicks.

If this is a new site that has never had an experienced person working on it, I would be looking at some of these.....

--  Talk to biz owner, get to understand his goals for the site (he might need help with this), be sure that the website is designed to make them happen and contribute to his biz

--  are their any technical failures?  (remove frames, check crawlability, get canonical issues fixed, look for things that could cause problems with Google such as dupe content)

--  are there any conversion failures (some sites are built by people who know nothing about selling on the web), are the paths to conversion obvious and easy.... are calls to actions obvious and clear... is the good stuff above the fold and pretty....  Some people say this isn't SEO work but if you want the client to be singing about the sales that you produced failures by the designer here can really tank YOUR performance

--  Next do LEBA analysis (Least-Effort-Best-Appearance).... what easy content, graphics, testimonial, contact info, can be quickly produced that will really give the site a lift?

--  Think about SEO after the above are finished

More than a month as gone now.

Your competitors are saying.... "We have been here working hard for the past 20 years."

A good score on "page optimization" only "qualifies" you to enter the SERPs.  It does not produce automatic rankings.  Rankings are earned by building a domain with authority and trust.

You are trying to make money from a geographic area, that means you need to invest in producing a buzz for your site and your business to perform well in  local search. To do that you need local assets, such as local reviews, local mentions, local links.

This sounds great.  You have new content that is much better and probably much longer with a greater diversity of words and maybe some improved images.

I do this every week.

Simply add the new content to the page but keep all of the SEO elements intact.  That would be things like title tag H1, H2 tags, etc.

When I do this my rankings often go up and my traffic goes up from capturing more long-tail keywords.

Good luck!

I am very confident that anchor text on internal links passes value to the target page.  It also can add optimization on the host page.

However, on  an ecommerce site I would select internal anchor text that strongly and quickly communicates the destination content to the visitor.

Slap their face with your words....   "Green Widgets"

If you select anchor text that communicates the content of the target page to your visitor as strongly as  a slap on the face then you have at the same time selected anchor text that will help you in the SERPs.

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Your post was self-promotion.  Not allowed here.

Also, if you are selling English language content it is very poorly done.

Do not use the .info.

Lots of people who know his domain is somelawfirm.info will type in somelawfirm.com

I make this type of mistake when I am going to .gov sites.  I type .com and I should know better.  It is habit.

The harder you work to make his site popular the more people will go to somelawfirm.info by mistake.  He does not want them going to a spammy site.   Important clients, partners and potential contacts will go there and say WTF?

Look, this guy is an attorney and somelawfirm.com is a fantastic domain if this is the type of work that he does.  He should get in touch with the owner and buy it.  Just pay for it.

I would pay at least $10,000 for that domain if I was an attorney in that line of business.  I would probably pay more.

Cheap, cheap, cheap compared to the cost of telephone directory, or billboard, or TV or radio advertising.

Don't be cheap, buy the domain.

(you might want to edit the domain out of your post...  you don't want people going there and generating traffic for this person if you are thinking about buying the domain. .. or maybe someone who sees this post will run to buy it and then sell it to you for an even higher price.)

Did you take physics in high school or college?

Your question is similar to..... "What is the difference between speed and acceleration?"

Just because you are "continuously acquiring quality back-links" doesn't mean that your competitors are sitting on their butts.

If you are gaining ten links per day but the guy above you is gaining twenty you will never ever catch him....

.... and if he is on the third page then the guys near the top of page two might be gaining hundreds per day.

Every time you move up a position in the SERPs the website directly above you will require a greater level of effort to defeat.

That means you gotta press the accelerator down harder and harder as you move up the SERPs.  Will you have it floored before you reach the top of page two?

In lightly competitive SERPs you might be able to defeat everyone... but when you get into the heavyweight SERPs the increasing competition will at some point be more than most people can muster.

That's where you hit "SERP lock" as you call it.

Keep in mind that the people behind you are working hard too..... you might  tramp the pedal to the floor and see people from behind passing you buy.

My personal opinion is... more people who hold any SERPs today will be lower in the rankings than will be more highly ranked by this time next year.  Really.  They are going to be displaced by existing heavyweights who are expanding their reach and new heavyweights who are starting to accelerate.

Pick ten SERPs in different niches that interest you and record who is in position #5.  Then come back in a year and look for them.  More will go down than up.

We're looking at the SEO value of syndicating our client's blog....

In my opinion, there was never any SEO value to doing this.

Before Panda it put all of that content out there onto other websites that would immediately be in competition with you for rankings, traffic, links, likes, etc.  Besides that, why should anybody come to your site when you have distributed your content all over the web like stale popcorn?  Just because it was published on your site first does not guarantee you preference in the SERPs.  Preference goes to authority, trust and power, which you might not have compared to the new sites that are now displaying your content.   This is feeding your competitors and creating new ones.

Now, after Panda you have a real risk with duplicate content.  And, now, after Penguin you have risk from the all of the links that you are going to load into that content.

Dangerous.

Have you considered producing content that is so kickass that everyone everywhere will want to visit your website to see it?  And, keeping it only on your website?

If you can improve the article - especially the content - then you should do it without any concerns.

I have been running a site for about 8 years.  In that time I have published a lot of content.  Now I am at the point where more of my time is spent on updating articles or improving articles than publishing new articles.   I am always adding additional photos, updates from the news, improved photos, sometimes complete rewrites.  A lot of my early content was fairly short articles.  Now I am replacing them with much more substantive articles with lots of images, photos, graphs, data.   Rankings very often jump up after a major improvement is done.

One of the pages on the website is #7 on the first page for a highly competetive keyword. Since I would like to improve rankings and the page is not optimized (e.g. keyword density is 0), is it SEO-wise to edit an article and create a good on-page optimization?

I often spend one, two or three days on improving an article like this and have someone helping me with images, photos, research.  Make content on this page that will blow everyone else away.  Go out there to make their content look puny.