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The only issue I see here is that you said "clients." Are these clients of yours all hosted on the same server with the same IP? Google does take this into account, notably to punish server farms and the like. I'm not exactly sure what levels of cross-linking will count for or against you, but I imagine these sites are relatively small with low domain authority so it shouldn't be an issue.

I might consider posting the doctor's articles on reputable medical sites and then link your clients' sites to articles on these bigger sites with higher domain authority. Try to get your wine articles on other wine related sites as well. You can also try using Zemanta to help with getting more people to link to this content.

One thing many clients do is compare search results when logged in to results when logged out. So to see where you're really at, get going with SEOmoz Pro. After you take care of that content issue or fix whatever problem you're having, you can ask for site reconsideration here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843\. Hope that helps.

I had the same problem with Chinese and received a very honest response via e-mail:

Hi Kevin

I feel like I've got to be honest with you. It's an old tool and we're not very proud of it anymore. It doesn't take advantage of our awesome web index, or all the cool analysis we've done around powerful links. We're working instead to replace it with more powerful link tools. Our newer tools are built to support Unicode, but most of our older ones don't. Sorry about that!

For example, I think you'd be much better off trying our Competitive Link Research Tool (it's in Labs and therefore sometimes gets overloaded, but it's so cool when it works!), or even running your competitors through Open Site Explorer.

www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect
www.opensiteexplorer.org

The bottom line is that Juicy Link Finder is unstable and doesn't support Unicode (because we're deprecating it in favor of new technologies), and it doesn't give you very sophisticated results.

As a note on forums, I've found Google does like these links, especially links in the signature that appear will all a user's posts. If that particular forum has strong trust and domain authority, this will surely impact a young site's rankings. To emphasize the importance of forums, Google even added a search option along side images, videos, shopping, etc. called discussions, where users can limit searches to forum posts and other discussion boards. Even SEomoz values forums, as we all get rewarded for posting and generating useful content.

I'm going to take a stab at this one and try to stay as unbiased as possible. First thing to consider here is if those sites hosting these profile pages have noteworthy domain authority. I'm not sure how many reputable sites really allow link juice to flow in profile pages as you mentioned, but if this is the case, then it's reasonable to assume this link will count as a followed linking root domain. This has, indeed, been noted as one of the most important factors in search ranking, but there are other forces at work that limit the benefit of this kind of inbound linking technique. I wouldn't call this black hat per se, put I wouldn't focus my efforts on chasing this competitor on these sites either.

Watch some webinars here and you'll learn that links that never get clicked aren't contributing a lot to your ranking or the linking site's domain authority. And a sudden massive increase in linking root domains without an increase in traffic raises red flags that someone is trying to manipulate the system, ie. engaging in black hat SEO activities. Also note that Google loves fresh content, so I'd rest easy knowing that these links will go stale at some point in the near future, especially with no good copy to entice visitors to click the link.

So instead of worrying about your competitors who are focused on short term rankings, write some good articles about your products and services and start getting the word out; build trust and extend your brand. There is so much more you can focus on that will get people to visit your site and spend money, which is the whole point of having your Internet business. So I would try not to worry about cheaters. Even if these competitors are ranking higher for the time being, I'm willing to bet they are probably not putting much energy into selling.

After comparing your links, I see that there are a few parameters that your ticketing platform added to the end of the URLs, like ReturnURL and CntPageID. You can go into your Google and Bing Webmaster Tools, and Yahoo Site Explorer as well, and tell these search engines to ignore those parameters on all URLs of your site. I'd also recommend canonical URLs if you have the option in your ticketing system. Now I'm not sure whether or not those parameter handling settings will be sent to SEOmoz when linking to Google WMT. Anybody?

I watched a few SEOmoz webinars and Rand Fishkin mentions a bit about keyword vectors, which were explained to be a matrix of sorts that groups keywords with related words. The example given was a key word snowboard is associated with mountain, snow, cabin, etc., so I'm sure Facade and Façade are closely associated, but they're apparently treated as different terms when it comes to search results--just try searching for both Facade and Façade separately (and together) and you'll get different results. I'd venture to guess that versions of words like cafe and café, resume and résumé are prioritized by location and local language, but I'll need someone to confirm that.

I write copy in Chinese and English, but since I am not a native Chinese speaker, I creatively include all versions of questionable terms in anchor text and the content body at least once. To find the variation of the term I want to use consistently, I first check the local dictionary, ask my target audience, and then do a search of all variations in different search engines to decide where I want to rank highest. I've been happy with the long term results.

I thought about a subdomain, but I think it would complicate things from an SEO standpoint. From what I've learned, a subdomain here would get treated as a separate domain and send link juice to an English page that wouldn't be accessible to visitors direct (only within another Chinese page as a lightbox). I'm sure there's a cleaner way to do this.

What I'm looking for is ranking effects of using the Lang element or ATTLIST declaration with lang element to identify various languages on the same page. Or if there is any other way to let search engines know I'm using multiple languages on a single page, it'd be a super time saver.

Thanks for all your input so far!

Thanks for the input Ryan. My challenge here is that both languages will be used on nearly all pages site wide. I'll look deeper into the JS lightbox method, but my initial thoughts are that the html would appear in multiple places on the site, and I'm not sure how search engines will treat an English document inside a Chinese document. Of course my priority is usability, but as I go through the design process, I was just hoping to find a way to get the search engines to count content in both languages toward SEO ranking.

I am working on a language teaching site for Chinese speakers learning English. I consider myself above average when it comes to basic SEO issues, but all I know here is that Google doesn't like multiple languages on a single page.

Without getting into too many details, both Chinese and English text will appear on the same page with links, tags, phonetic spellings, etc.

I'm hoping someone here knows the science about using the lang="zh" xml:lang="zh" attributes within text and the effects on ranking for text within the declarations. And it'd be great if there was clarification on the link juice passed using the hreflang attribute for both internal and external links. Also, of course, any info on using both English and Chinese characters in the URL would be most helpful. A heads up on any other language specific SEO issues would also be much appreciated.

My goal is to get the most out of both languages per page in terms of ranking.