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I just disagree with you. Even at the #1 position, you are missing out on 50+% of the available organic traffic for that keyword. Multi-site strategies are always the right way to go. Seriously, if you really believe that paid linking and black hat link building are dangerous to your and your client's sites, then why in the hell would you have only 1 property that is easily susceptible to a client buying links to and spamming?

Successful SEO's thrive on those who are afraid of taking risks.

Copy and paste the article to a unique URL. Don't worry about having a duplicate copy of 1 other page on the internet. If you really want to be careful, simply add 100 words or so of commentary or response to the bottom of the article, and maybe 30 to 50 words of description above each article (ie: This article was posted at {site} on {date} regarding {topic} and {client}. blah blah blah)

Would have to take a closer look. Would you be willing to identify the domain here, or PM it to someone?

I would leave them on the old site with the 301 redirect for as long as possible. Assuming it is not cost prohibitive to keep the old site up, the last thing you want to happen is to let your old domain drop and have someone else pick it up or pull the old product pages and have Google now think that those URLs should be 404'd rather than 301'd

Have some documentation available to prove that the domain dropped and that you are a different owner. People regularly tell google that they "just bought this website and had no idea that it had problems blah blah blah". They are going to want some evidence.

1. Add tags to each article that link off to related content (an easy way is to just have it link to your site search results for that tag)

2. Increase internal linking in the content of your articles to other pages on your site to coax users into reading more.

3. Include "related pages" or something similar at the end of every piece of content published on your site.

4. Add "popular pages" to the sidebar to catch people who might simply find your most popular information interesting.

Good questions...

1. How is the 2nd Site Used? The second, third, fourth and so on sites are wholly separate from your first and are used to test gray and black-hat strategies - whether they be paid links, forum profile links, article syndication, directories, comment spam, whatever.

2. What do you do in 3 years...? Let me ask you a counter question. What are you going to do in 3 years when you aren't making any money from your primary site because, like the last 15 years of Google's existence, they still don't have full control over gray and black hat strategies to allow your white hat strategies to work? I'll tell you exactly what you are going to do.

• You are going to laugh your way to the bank while intelligently continuing to reinvest the majority of your profits in your white-hat property.
• You are going to use the knowledge you learned about what links work, what keywords are easier to rank for, etc. to improve your white hat site.
• You are going to suffocate your competitors out of the SERPs as they find it harder and harder to compete against your niche-empire.
• You are going to look back on today and say, hey, that russ guy is fricken awesome. I should buy him a beer. Then you are going to call me up, and I am going to think it is totally weird, but I am a sucker for beer.

Create new sites, copy their tactics, try out new ones. Ratting to Google will almost never work (too many fish to fry). Seriously, if something is working but is too black-hat for your main property, create another property. You can get a gorgeous wordpress theme for $35, get web hosting for $5/mo and register a new domain for $10, and get 9 articles of content written over at text broker for $5 bucks a pop. Now you have a website up and running for $100 on a new IP address ready to do whatever you want.

Churn and burn. Churn. and. Burn.

I would keep the listing at this point. More and more web publishers are sourcing their local data from sites like yellowbook, which means there is growing potential to get syndicated links from these listings and additional citations. I think the combined value of YellowBook type marketing and potential benefits of an additional citation and/or link make it worthwhile.

It sounds to me that you are in the clear. The use of the canonical tag would prevent pagerank dispersion, the use of the nofollow tag would as well, and the robots.txt file should prevent the spidering of those pages. Is google indexing any of the category filter pages?

There is a lot that goes into this, but my first step would be to find your target link audience (fan sites of the artist, wikipedia and encylopedic listings about the artist, relevant news sources.) Build this list before you start building content.

Google Webmaster Tools and Open Site Explorer rely on different data. SEOMoz has their own index of the web which they use to create the link statistics you see in Open Site Explorer. Their index is substantially smaller than Google's, but represents a significant proportion of the overall web.

What really matters is proportion, though. How many root domains do you have linking vs. your competitors? You can't get that information from Google Webmaster Tools, but you can from OSE.

Linking Root Domains are the number of Individual Websites that are linking to you. For example, if you have 1000 links but they all come from different pages on the same website, that counts as only 1 Linking Root Domain.

My guess is that you need to acquire links to your homepage and your site as a whole from a wide range of different websites so as to build up your general site authority.

I'll give a shot at this...

Let's say you own "site.com", and on that site you have "site.com, www.site.com, and blogs.site.com"

The "Root Domain" metric, if you typed in "www.site.com" into OSE would include all 3, as it matches anything with the "Root Domain" in it.

The "Sub Domain" metric, if you typed in "www.site.com" into OSE would ONLY include links to the "www.site.com" sub domain. Yes "www." is actually a Subdomain of site.com, it just happens to be the subdomain everyone uses for general web traffic.

Each metric is useful for different things, but generally I look at the www.site.com subdomain metric.  In my opinion, most authority metrics are sub-domain specific (which is why a blog on wordpress.com or blogspot.com isn't immediately ranking for everything - the root domain doesn't matter, the subdomain does).

I would take the outbound link concern with a grain of salt. The potential "PageRank Leak" caused by using outbound links on your ranking page is so minimal that it is not worth considering. Add the links that make sense, especially to other authority pages / sites that aren't necessarily competing for the same keyword. Add tons of great content and then start looking into what really matters - inbound links.

Perhaps I have misread, but what is the problem with doing...

brand.ccTLD/productA/

Where all ccTLD's point to the same server and the only thing different between the two is that when language differences are in place, it grabs from a separate database table and language-file based on the ccTLD. This would allow you to keep just 1 server, still have keyword-optimized content, etc.

You wouldn't be able to really build off of the domain authority, but separating into sub-domains will essentially segregate the authority as well.

The SEO industry in general likes to "move along" whenever they catch wind that Google has cracked down on something. This is a mistake, though. Google may use X algorithm to find sites that are employing Y strategy. IE, for reciprocal links Google targeted large sprawling partner pages, not just whether or not two domains linked to one another. You could still succeed with merely a different method of placing the reciprocal links...

That being said, I would never tell you that blog roll links don't work, I would merely tell you to use those strategies on sites that are less important in the long roll.

But, of course, I would probably tell you to use just about any and every strategy, as long as you divide those strategies across sites so as to minimize risk.

NP

Good questions...

1. First, it is difficult to prove that the techniques you notice competitors using are actually responsible for their rankings. I know it is frustrating to stomach, but the easy-to-detect stuff is generally ignored by Google. Chances are, your competitors are getting something right other than simply relying on the one strategy you easily see.

2. The general response to reciprocal link strategies was to devalue gigantic link directories created on individual sites. You know, these sprawling "partner" sections. This update probably has little to no impact on other reciprocal strategies such as blog-roll exchange.

I guess my bigger question is this - if you are certain these strategies are working, but are afraid they may end up with penalties, why not create a secondary site and start using them? It costs $9.95 a year for another domain. Wordpress is free. You can get hosting for it at $5/mo.  It is time to start a multi-site strategy and play some hardball. Divide. And. Conquer.

Keynes said it best, in the long run we are all dead. With multi-site strategy, you can keep your long-run horse in the race, but run every dirty tactic you like on churn-and-burn sites you don't care about.