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I would increase the amount of great content and improve the quality of the content that is already in place.  Content is what people link to.  Great content = quality links = high DA.

I would not call it nefarious.  I would simply call it duplicate content that Google will not be pleased with.  Google can see lazy efforts to get links - and you are giving a reward to people who accommodate you.   It's duplicate content.  Google will likely ignore most of it.  If you do this at scale don't be surprised if none of these links are counted.

If you stop doing the things that cause the DMCA hits and start over on a new domain then this problem will be gone.

Backlino Guy is talking about a table of contents at the top of the article...

See the gray box TOC on the left side of this wikipedia page for Philadelphia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia

On-page anchor links with keyword hypertext, in my opinion, are second in optimization power only to the <title>tag.  One of the secret weapons of big article optimization.</p> <p>Hub-and-spoke is a multipage technique.  You have one main page for a topic... like Pennsylvania... and that page links out to many article pages about different cities, form of government, economy, parks, etc.   It is similar to a category page but is self-standing expository content.</p></title>

I agree.  Get Hemingway or Grammerly and rewrite from scratch without looking at the original.

Yes, you can make lots of changes to an article after it is posted.

When I am working on an article, I upload it as soon as a have a top image and a couple paragraphs.  Then, over the next few days, I upload sections of the article as I get them finished.

I often edit sections within a day of their first upload.

Two or three years later, I often find something new to add to the article.  At that time I add the new material and give the entire article a critical reading that usually includes lots of updates and new information.   I believe that these are often immediately beneficial to rankings.

I don't know if rewriting a couple hundred articles to capture the ad income from a few thousand sessions per month will be a good use of anyone's time.

Does this site have a another stream of income?   Paid links, perhaps?

The image is property of XYZ company.  If you want to use it you will need to contact them for permission.  Or offer to pay them a license fee.  Or do whatever they ask in exchange for its use.

Many images are not available for use by anyone no matter how much you offer to pay.

Using images belonging to another company can result in civil or criminal liability.  If you willfully use an image, knowing that you are not entitled to use it, you can be liable for damages of up to $150,000 per image.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_damages_for_copyright_infringement

Lots of people steal my images.  We file DMCA claims with Google search, complain to Google Adsense, and complain to hosting companies.  Those complaints result in images and the pages where they appear being blocked from search, removed from servers, or Adsense being turned off on those pages or on the entire website.  Those are easy  for a copyright owner to accomplish.  If repeated infringement occurs, I have an attorney who is ready to file formal complaints.    We have done these things hundreds of times.

So, get permission, use a stock photo, get a camera and take your own photos.  We spend thousands of dollars every month on images and will do what we need to do to protect our property.

If the rankings of the criminal defense pages have direct links then those links are helpful to any query that any page of the site competes for.  So, I would not delete them.

There are law firms with strong websites that rule the SERPs for everything in their town.   Their office takes any call that comes in, accepts the cases in practice areas where they have interest and expertise, and refers the rest to other firms for a referral fee.

We get tons of content offers.  Many offer to pay us.   Some offer free content.   In over 20 years, we have only accepted a few of these offers.    Here are the reasons...

1. First...  99% of the time the content is far below our editorial standards.   Trash.  Prattle.  We would be ashamed to publish it.  It is so bad we are not even interested in working with them.

2. We are not interested in being a platform for link builders.  If they are building links with articles we know that they might be doing enough of that to get in trouble with Google.    Google knows that people use articles, guest posts, etc. to build unnatural links.  Just today at Search Engine RoundTable, Barry had a post about that - saying that links in guest posts should be nofollowed.

I will say that we have received golden content offered to us.   Content of the highest quality.  But, the authors of this content simply wanted to have their content on our website, so they could share their work with our visitors.  These were professors and scholars who are all about writing and publishing.    They did not have links in the content to their personal websites or to employer websites, or to any websites that might be concerned about links.  These authors knew nothing about links.  One gave us three or four articles and we then starting paying him to write about topics that we needed.   His articles have been some of the best performing on our website.

Right now I have a dilema.   A highly qualified author with excellent content repeatedly emailing to get his article published.  But, he is with a website that is hard core linkbuilders and they will get angry if I nofollow their links.  So, I will keep deleting his emails.

Do you think you have a good domain for a website targeting... Scottish Wedding Photographer?   Just askin'.

Make a list of the content pages that you could write that would be most valuable for your site visitors.

Start writing, don't look at DA for six months, do what is valuable for your visitor, create what they want, create what will help convert sales on your site.

Do you know that Google does not use DA?   It is a Moz number.  It will not win anything for you.

So instead of watching a number that means nothing, spend your time on content that will win your wars.  The more you look at DA the less work you will get done.

The specific page has.....  >500 domains linking to it.

This is rocket fuel.   Irrelevant articles help lots of websites.

Find the person who wrote that article for you and give them a really nice gift.

Ask them to write another article about plants in the office.

Ask them to come up with some great photos of plants (that you are legally able to distribute as screensavers, branded lightly with your domain) and give them to people.

Advertise the new article about plants on the popular page, advertise the screen saver on your popular page.

I don't think that you are going to kill a software giant with irrelevant articles but I believe from experience that they can be very helpful to your rankings.   Plus, we make a few sales every month to people who landed on our website to consume irrelevant content - and the products that we sell are irrelevant to the content and damn few people want what is sold on that site.

Spend your time building something great on your main website.   I sure would not build an outhouse on is.edu.

I honestly believe that Domain Authority is a decoy that takes you away from the basics of making a great website, the basics of winning on the web, and the basics of making money.

If you spend your energy on making a great website, making money, and winning on the web then you will have something tangible for your efforts.

If you instead spend your time chasing..... What can I do to get high DA??... then the energy that you  spend is inefficient.

Working  to build high DA will not directly make your website great, make you win on the web, or make you buckets of money.   Chasing high DA when your goal is something else is like trying to kill a rabbit with a ricochet.

So instead of shooting at a rock with the hope that your bullet will bounce off and kill the rabbit, you should instead just shoot that rabbit.

DA worship is not a good use of your time.

So, how big of a mega menu are we talking about?

Ten links?  Fifty?  A hundred?

I think if you go waaaaaayyy to big it can be a problem with both usability and SEO.  But the SEO problem is not in the link dilution.

Wow!   Tom, that was a very generous and expert response.

Nice work!

Chris links to a lot of moz content.  The one that I like best is a Whiteboard Friday by Rand.

https://moz.com/blog/seo-photos-visuals-graphics-whiteboard-friday

Pay special attention to   K)   (note that he explains it before he points to it)     K) is all about having great organic rankings in websearch for the keywords that you want to appear for in image search.

Thanks for the additional information.

I am surprised that your image search traffic dropped.

Did you change the URLs of the images, change their file names, change their alt attribute, change their size (file or pixel), change where they are hosted?