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Darin & CMC-SD.   Thanks for your comments.  I am highly experienced in my field.  Very few guest blogging opportunities are available in the properties that occupy the SERPs I'm competing in.  Smaller indy blogs (whose owners I've known for years) probably offer realistic opportunities for guest blogging. But I don't want to convert their customers to mine. (The product should be inherently local but there are national providers.) My concern is how to counter the "authority" of the copywriters.  I'm concerned that G will look at the authority, page rank and engagement (bounce rate & time on page) of larger sites and reward the copywriter with authority status based more upon the platform they publish on than any real authority on the matters they write. Although G could begin to compare the number of fields an author publishes in and add an educational history and licensing status to G+ pages, I suspect that G wouldn't bother to go through any extra steps (costs).  Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but selling Adwords is G's business and search results just need to be "good enough" without being too darn good. Again, thanks to both of you.

Alan : Thanks for sharing your experience in such detail.

Thanks for following up, JustDucky.