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What date (roughly) did you put the link up? Have you cross-referenced that date with Moz's Google Algorithm History http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change#2013? I would first look at your drop in rankings compared to the algorithm updates to see if there is any correlation there. That seems more likely to me.

Also, you could consider running http://www.styleshout.com/ through OSE to see if it has any dubious back links. From my understanding, certain pages can have a high page rank, but still have a dangerous links that could hurt you.

I think people misinterpreted my question. I didn't "start boiling articles down to numbers," I just posted what happens to be the averages for my posts. When I write them, most come out to about 800-1200 to answer the question, and I end up citing about 4 to 5 sources. When I saw a few "1 link/125 word" suggestions, I wanted to see if there was any validity to that and if the numbers that I naturally produce could be a problem...other than the footer links, of course. I now see why that's a problem.

I get why I shouldn't use the footer links anymore, but I don't understand the comment 'sounds like a great way to get a Penguin attack." For my posts, it takes about 800 to 1200 words to answer the topic, and I usually end up citing/linking to 4 outside sources. I don't plan on this framework, but that's basically the average.

Are you saying the posts have too short a word count or there are too many links? Yes, I do understand I should be focusing on content and ux first and foremost, but since you said that in relation to the number I gave, I was wondering if that triggered some red flag I need to know about.

Thank you for your advise and input. I appreciate it very much.

Ruben

I've seen this "1 link per 125 words" for blog posts suggestion pop up a variety of places. I wanted to know if that's "correct" or a best practice? In my posts, I generally write between 800 to 1200 words with about 4 to 6 links in the body of the post. However, (and this may be a problem) I add about 13 links in my closing paragraph, "if you have any legal questions, etc etc, click here for your "Tampa personal injury attorney, Clearwater Personal Injury Attorney, etc etc for all the areas we practice in related to that blog post."

Should I stop doing that? Does that come off as spammy? (The blog is hosted on our site, if that matters for this question at all).

Thanks,

Ruben

Find an SEO agency can be terrifying. This link to the best SEO companies of 2013 still has Blue Glass listed as number 4,and they collapsed months ago. http://www.bestseocompanies.com/top-50-seo-company-rankings/

I have two suggestions for how to go about hiring a respectable SEO agency.

1. Spends some time educating yourself. Go buy an SEO for Dummies book, look up whatever SEO 101 material you can, browse this forum to glean whatever buzz words you can, and (depending on how much time you spend on it) you should know enough to at least evaluate the ugly ones.

2. I'd consider hiring someone's inhouse SEO to help you pick an agency. It's probable one of your business contacts or partners with your magazine is using one. If you can get that person or someone like that, then you can have an unbiased person to assist you in the decision for whatever fee you'd agree to pay for the help. I'm sure it'd be less than hiring an employment agency.

Food for thought...I hope it helps.

Ruben

If you can't compete with "NHL 14 Tips" why not be more specific? Try to rank for team specific keywords, like "NHL Tips For Detroit Red Wings" and on down the line. Personally, I wouldn't want to know how to win at NHL 14 in general, I'd want to know how to win with my team (The Lightning, of course). That level of specificity would require more videos obviously, but it could work. Think of it this way, if someone is typing in "NHL 14 Tips" and then, in the autocomplete section" your "NHL 14 Tips for the Chicago Blackhawks/Detroit Redwings/etc" pop up as options, I could see people going to the team specific tips more than the generic ones. You don't know till you test it, but it seems plausible to me.

I don't have an answer to your question (sorry), but do you mind posting the link to that tf-idf blog post? I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd like to read it. Thanks!

We run on wordpress. The WP Smush.it plugin sounds like just the thing we need. Thanks!

Perhaps their word choice is off, but from my understanding "errors" are more severe than 'warnings," hence the red for errors vs the yellow for warnings. They probably put "dupe content" in errors, because it's more dangerous for your site.

We have a number of pages that are divided by locality, but cover the same general topic. For example, we have our Pasco County Divorce Attorney page (http://www.kempruge.com/location/pasco-county/pasco-county-divorce-attorneys/) vs our Tampa Divorce Attorney page (http://www.kempruge.com/location/tampa/tampa-divorce-attorneys/). I have changed around the text of the page, so it's not flagged for duplicate content, but I have the same image on both pages. How big of a problem is this or is this a problem at all?

Thanks and Happy Friday,

Ruben

I need to add more photos to our site, since I believe it'd be a better user experience, but I don't want our page speed to slow down. Is there an optimal size or quality photo parameters that work best for this? If so, is there a site or service someone would recommend over photobucket to get them?

Thanks,

Ruben

Chris,

I have a quick question on the article you posted. I wasn't clear on what to do about listing phone numbers. We operate in four counties with offices in three of those counties. We have unique phone numbers for Hernando County, Hillsborough County, Pasco/Pinellas County (they share one) and a toll-free number. However, all these numbers get forwarded to our main office in Pasco County.

When we do citations, what phone number should we pick? We could do the toll-free number for all of them, that would make it universal. We could do the phone number that matches their county, but that number gets forwarded. Or, we could just use the main office line number for every office to avoid any forwarding. What do you think?

Thanks,

Ruben

Well, ideally, I would just generate content for our blog, however, I'm running under the assumption, I can't just write posts for us and then submit them to other people to post on their blog/media source, because no one wants duplicate content. I was thinking contributing to other people's blogs with original content would be a good kick start to building our blog presence until it stands on its own.

Thanks for the articles! I definitely have some research to do. I really appreciate it.

Okay, what do you think of Andre's response? Just by the nature of Personal Injury law, we have a circle of doctors, clinics, chiro's etc that we refer to clients to and vice versa. Would reaching out and posting to them (at least the one's that have decent websites) be more beneficial?

Also, while I believe what everyone says about "crappy links not working" because most people on here know far more than me, I don't understand how this site" http://www.theinjurylawyers.com/automobileaccidents.htm does so well? They have links to biker dating site forums, and host of other nonsense (according to site explorer) but it doesn't seem to be hurting them at all.

In an effort to build some links, we want to really work on improving our blog content and exposure. We want to write two quality posts per week, and submit 1 quality guest post every 1-2 weeks. However, we're not sure how to go about submitting guest posts or who to submit them to?

I found an all article from SEOmoz http://moz.com/blog/4-valuable-link-building-services but it's from 2010. Is myguestblog still a good source? Are there better ways of doing it? Also, is ever advisable to pay to submit a post? Some of the legal blogs (we're a law firm) have this option, but that strikes me as spammy or low quality links.

Just to reiterate, we are striving to write high-quality useful content audiences will find beneficial, not just junk or salesmanship. If it takes longer than a week to write posts like that, that's fine. We just really need some specific advise on who we should be submitting our guest posts to and who we should avoid.

Thank you all so much for any advice or suggestions,

Ruben

If you created quality pages, I don't know why it would have hurt your Edmonton pages. Did you check your domain authority to see if dropped? Also, did you run a comparison against the people who are now ahead of you? Did they get new links or improve in some way to jump you?

In my area, there are few different law enforcement agencies that post real time data on car accidents. One is http://www.flhsmv.gov/fhp/traffic/crs_h501.htm. They post the accidents by county, and then in the location heading, they add the intersection and the city. For most of these counties and cities, our website, http://www.kempruge.com/personal-injury/auto-and-car-accidents/ has city and county specific pages. I need to figure out a way to pull the information from the FHP site and other real time crash sites so that it will automatically post on our pages. For example, if there's an accident in Hillsborough County on I-275 in Tampa, I'd like to have that immediately post on our "Hillsborough county car accident attorney" page and our "Tampa car accident attorney" page.

I want our pages to have something comparable to a stock ticker widget, but for car accidents specific to each pages location AND combines all the info from the various law enforcement agencies. Any thoughts on how to go about creating this?

As always, thank you all for taking time out of your work to assist me with whatever information or ideas you have. I really appreciate it.

If you do it the way you are suggesting, you can end up with a duplicate content problem. I did some work for an online pet store that set their products up the way you are describing. For example, yellow dog bowl, red dog bowl, green dog bowl. However, we couldn't have different pages with the same description and just change the colors around. The pages were being flagged as duplicate content. So, we had to rewrite unique descriptions for every page, even though only the color was different. That's a pain. So, if you go the multi-page route, be prepared to have to do that.

As always, thank you everyone for your advice. This community is great! I really do appreciate it.

Well, we were under the impression that since Google owned Blogger, they would value those blogs more (whether they said so or not). Apparently, this thread has made it clear they don't.