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I don't think we're ever going to get to the point where people stop asking about meta keywords and blog commenting and keyword density, etc. etc.  The main reason for this is that there is so much content online that will stay there for eternity, so when newbies start out they are going to find this information and have questions about it.

Similarly, when you first start doing SEO, you want to do everything you can to improve on page stuff and people are usually quite intimidated by getting others to link to their sites.  So, the idea that you could potentially rank better by stuffing your keywords or doing other "easy" stuff is going to be appealing.

What I like so far about SEOMoz is that there is a real mixture.  I feel that I can help out by answering the newbies' questions, but I have so much to learn from the experienced folks.  It's great!

Google employee John Mueller was asked this recently in a hangout and he said that it had been a while since the last one so hopefully we get one soon.  But, no one outside of a select few at Google knows when it will happen.  It's been almost 8 months now.

Matt Cutts said at a conference that 6 months was a reasonable time to wait between Penguin refreshes but that it could be significantly more.

I don't have the answer you are looking for but I wanted to share what my main "client" does.  My husband is a real estate agent, and he is the reason why I got into SEO.  I learned how to optimize his site and have done very well at it.

He gets calls several times a week from people who want to rank his site (despite the fact that he is ranking well for most terms.)  This is what he tells them:  I have a really good SEO working for me already.  She's super expensive but she's good.  She's so good, in fact, that I married her.

The SEO usually doesn't know what to say after that.  

btw...what I usually tell people in regards to SEOs who call or email for business is that all of the really good SEOs don't have the time or the need to make unsolicited phone calls for business.  The good ones have people beating down their door.  If someone is calling and begging for your business then they probably are an amateur and don't know what they are doing.

This is a question that would take a few hours to answer properly. Here are my brief thoughts.

What you've described with the short news articles sounds like Panda fodder for sure to me. If they're republishing news stories without adding value of their own then this is not a good idea. Too many of these can cause Panda to demote the entire site (not just the news articles.) In most cases I'd noindex content like this. Sometimes you can consolidate content into a thorough piece of content, but usually either noindexing or removing the content is best.

Also, it's not the number of words that matters. If they decided to write 1000 word articles that were essentially repeating what could be found on other news sites this would also be thin content. If they produce content that they want to have in the Google index, then Google has to have a reason to send readers to their content rather than to the hundreds of other people who wrote about the same news story.

I have a story as well about something that happened to me today and it is relevant to your question.  We have a real estate site and today we started getting hits for "top realtor in [city]".  I was trying to figure out why because we haven't optimized for this at all.

Well, it turns out that I recently wrote a silly blog post called "Top 5 videos about....", and I also had a post on our site called "Top 10 neighborhoods in [city]".  The fact that the keyword "top" and the keyword "realtors" and the keyword "[city]" were on our site actually makes us rank on the first page for "top realtors in [city]".

The more content you have on your site the better!  As a result of this discovery today I actually rewrote our home page to include more keyword phrases that I want to rank for.  (You have to be careful to write for readers and not just search engines though.)

There's a good chance that your site has been affected by Panda.

As EGOL mentioned, if you search for text from these pages enclosed in quotes, your site is displayed.  BUT...take the quotes away and you're almost nowhere to be seen.

I don't think the Panda filter was brought on by the articles though.  It's probably the fact that a large portion of your site consists of thin content.  You have page after page that consists of, "We currently have no Urdu speaking lawyers listed in (State/Country). Fill out the form below and we will do our best to connect you with one. This service will be free of charge to you."

So, your site consists of a few articles plus a pile of thin content.  If Google sees that the majority of the site is not worthwhile showing to searchers then they'll flag it with Panda and the whole site can be affected.

There's a good chance that if you noindex the directory pages with no content that your article pages will eventually start to rank.

Google's Above the Fold Page Layout algorithm looks at how much good, helpful content is visible without scrolling:

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html

There is often a struggle between designers and SEOs because it sure looks nice to have a big huge image taking up all of the above the fold content but if there is no or limited helpful text there then that's not good from an SEO standpoint.

With that said, Google will still index content that is below the fold. It's debatable whether it's given the same weight as content higher up on a page though. Matt Cutts from Google has said before that a link that is higher up on a page is not worth any more than a link lower down on the page. However, some experiments by Moz contradict this.

This might be a fun experiment to do - create content both above and below a hero image and see what ranks best. I might even do that!

Marie

I like Kurt's answer.

In some cases a partial match penalty only affects say, one page of your site.  So, say you were a news site and someone wanted to boost up a particularly favorable article about themselves and they built spammy links to just that one article.  You don't need to do anything about those links.  The "penalty" just means that that page is not going to rank well.

But, if you've hired an SEO or done SEO on your own and know you have unnatural links then really you should clean it up.  In some cases a site can be penalized for one or more keywords and when the warning is lifted you can rank better for those keywords.  But, in many cases, when the work is done to remove the bad links and the warning gets lifted there is no immediate change in rankings.  However, if you have enough bad links to warrant a manual warning, you can be fairly certain that the Penguin algorithm either is, or is going to be, affecting your site.  For many sites once the work is done to remove the manual warning and then Penguin refreshes, they see a jump up.  You're not going to see a jump to prior levels though because those were gained on the power of unnatural links.

If you know you've got unnatural links and you do nothing to remove them you'll likely always have an anchor pulling down your rankings and even if you get new links you're not likely to see much improvement.

I'll add a vote for Wordpress.  I love it.

The process is frustrating, isn't it?

"Resubmitted and again was shown a handful of links by the Google admin person and told to contact and remove. The funny thing is that a few of them I disavowed in my list so they should not have pointed these out."

This brings up two points for me:

-If a few of these were on your disavow list, this means that some of them were not.  Google is showing you some links that needed to be addressed that are not.  I am seeing quite often lately that site owners are saying, "I removed xx% of links and still failed."  It is not the percentage that matters.  Google wants to see that you have attempted removal for each type of link that they deem unnatural.  "Unnatural" really means self made.  So, let's say you had a link profile containing a bunch of blog comment spam and also a little bit of article spam.  Let's say you removed almost all of the blog comment spam which accounted for 80% of your links but you didn't touch the article links.  Even though you got 80% removed, Google wants to see that you have tried to get the article links taken down.

I've done a lot of consultation for site owners who have failed at reconsideration and by far the most common reason is that not enough kinds of links were deemed necessary to be removed.

-Next, it is not enough to just disavow.  You've got to show that you've really tried to get the links removed.  What I do is contact the webmaster via any available contact info I can find on the site, the whois contact and also contact forms.  I show evidence by including a copy of the text of each email sent and screenshots of each contact form.  Some may say that this is overkill.  Perhaps this degree of work does not need to be done, but in my opinion it shows that I have REALLY tried to get links removed.

I hope that helps.  The process is so darn time consuming.

I have been working on a cool piece of linkbait for our real estate site and I finally bit the bullet and published it last night.  I pushed out a few emails to some local media.  This morning I was woken up by a phone call from a local radio station wanting to interview me about my article!

I realized when I hung up that I didn't ask for a link or even a mention of the website.  Hopefully they will mention it so it will get more attention!

I'd love to hear your experiences in working with the media like this.

In most cases, blog commenting is not terribly helpful in terms of SEO.  I have a few websites that consistently spam my blogs in hopes of me publishing a comment and it is terribly annoying.

Is your SEO building any quality links?  If you're paying him for a certain number of links and all you are getting is blog comments and forum sigs then it's time to get a new strategy!

The quality guidelines are pretty clear that it is not acceptable to give free product in exchange for a link that carries PageRank.

People are upset with the chrome satchel ad because it shows someone who creates a product (satchels) and then in the ad sends it to well known bloggers.  But nowhere in that ad does it say that she sent it in exchange for a link.  I think that the main idea of the ad showing her sending the product to a blogger was to get exposure for her product.  To stay within the guidelines this would be in the form of a no-followed link.  The ad goes on to show that Elle Magazine heard about the great product and asked if she could make one for them.

The whole point of the quality guidelines in regards to "link schemes" is that you should not be able to self manufacture links.  The reasons why links work to boost a site's rankings is because they are a vote for the quality of the site.  Bought votes don't mean that the site's quality is any better than another site.

Do I agree?  No.  I think that those bloggers wouldn't post a link if they didn't like the product.  (Well, most of them.)  So I think this should be acceptable.  But what I think doesn't matter.

If you've already exchanged product for links I wouldn't get too worried about it unless those links make up a large portion of your link profile.  But, I think that Google is trying to cut down on any forms of link building in which you create your own link, so personally I would not use this tactic.

EDIT: I just checked out the Cambridge Satchel backlink profile and they sure do have a lot of FOLLOWED links from blogs who reviewed their profile.  Perhaps the reason why this is allowed is because the links are branded as opposed to a keyword?

If they're received a sitewide manual penalty and have been deindexed, then you should see no results when you Google, "site:theirdomain.com".

But, more likely, if they're struggling to rank it's because of an algorithmic issue.  You could try looking at their data on SEMrush.com and seeing if there is a drop that coincides the date of a known algorithm change as seen on http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change.

Ultimately though it's just a guess.

If you have a paid subscription to SEOMoz then you have access to all of Q&A.

In my case, I had a paid subscription for a while and I was really active in Q&A.  In fact, I got my paid subscription so that I could take part in Q&A.  Now, I am no longer a pro member so I don't have access to the tools and some other things.  But, I can still take part in Q&A because I have >500 moz points.

I'm currently reading a book called "In the Plex" by Steven Levy which talks about how Google got started.  They talk about how Google learned to predict relevance.  I'll paraphrase the example because I don't have the book in front of me.

Let's say someone typed in the search phrase - i want to buy a cat, and they get their page of search results.  But let's say that they immediately go back and do another search.  (This tells Google that their results didn't provide an answer).  So this time they type in, i want to buy a kitten.  Now, Google knows that cat and kitten are relevant to each other.  Similarly, if their next search was i want to buy a devon rex then Google knows that cat, kitten, and devon rex are all similar terms.  Of course, the algorithm wouldn't change for just one user's search but rather if hundreds of people were interchanging cat for kitten then eventually the algo learns that they are relevant to each other.

So, how can you use this for seo purposes?  Check out this search for i want to buy a cat -cat The "-cat" tells Google not to include searches that use the word cat.  So, you get results that Google thinks are relevant to I want to buy a cat.  From this search I can see that I should also be targetting the words, kitten, persian, siamese, main coon, etc.

This is a quick off-the-top-of my head example, but you could certainly play with it.

LOL...yeah...that term is kind of silly.  But what else are they going to use?  Plussing?  Oneing?  

Where did that 400 to 500 word stat come from?  I would guess that this is just conjecture and that no one knows.

I have a number of articles on my site that are well over 500 words and do well in the SERPS.  I think that as long as you are writing useful information that is meant to help the reader then you will do well.  I personally don't think Google has an optimum number of words that they like.

95% of my website is made up of dynamically generated pages.  I get mine into the index (and keep them there) by doing this:

-when someone generates a new page a new record is made on a mysql database

-My home page and each of my internal pages has a list of "popular posts".  This list is simply a random list of 10 of the database entries.

When I started doing this my site traffic exploded as I had a lot of pages indexed.

If you are doing this though, be careful that the pages are not completely duplicate content.

I definitely vote for one big site as well.  I think every person has this idea that multiple sites will help because you will be able to crosslink them.  But the juice you get from those cross links is less than the juice you would get from having all of your links pointing to one site.

I would have one main site and then have 3 folders within the site each with their own focus.