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Webmaster tools is generally out of date and incomplete.  As far as actual rankings go, they should have an impact when they're crawled by Google, not when they show up in GWT.

Local SEO involves link building too, so not sure what your question is there?

If you're looking to improve your SEO, you have to look at 2 things: your onsite optimization (is your site optimized for search engines?) and offsite factors (link building).  If your site is already good, you should focus on link building.  If your site could use some work, it could make sense to focus on that first before focusing on links.

Here is a good article on the topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whats-better-on-page-seo-or-link-building

Syndicating content is generally not a problem, if you have a site with decent site authority and you are publishing articles on your site first, like you say.  2 things that will help Google sort out the original article:

1. If you have control over the code on the sites you are syndicating to, add a rel=canonical back to your own site
2. Include links in your syndicated articles pointing back to the original article on your own site.  This will help Google determine which was the original, as well as get you some link juice

Hope that helps.

I'm seeing the same thing too... could be a problem with their broad match thinking that link building is somehow related to auto insurance.  Or maybe SEOs don't know how to drive, LOL!

Yes, all links on a page will lessen the link equity of all other links on the page, even if they are nofollowed or in the comments.

Looks like each comment has 3 links each-- the name, date, and a reply link.  I would at least remove the date link-- I'm not familiar with Joost, but it should be fairly easy to edit in comments.php.

Could just mean the data in GWT isn't current or Google hasn't re-indexed all the content yet.  How long ago did you put in the canonicals?

Not sure about top 100, but here's a list of the top 10:

http://www.kronikmedia.co.uk/blog/top-adsense-earners-10-sites-that-earn-millions/1876/

It's a grey area-- we've sponsored various students clubs before, and saw some great .edu links.  The way to frame it is not so much you are paying them for links, so much as you are making a charitable donation to their organization, and they mention (and link to you) in order to recognize their sponsor.  You can do the same thing with sponsoring scholarships, or making donations to non-profits like charities, libraries, and museums.

He didn't receive an official notice, he saw his rankings drop for a handful of terms, and filed a reconsideration request (a no-no if you've engaged in greyhat tactics), and then received the response.

This isn't a sitewide penalty, he simply took a hit on a handful of keywords with overoptimized anchor text from low quality article sites.  If you run a link analysis, he isn't receiving a huge number of links from these, it should be possible to build his way out it.

I've looked at your backlink profile, there are definitely a lot of exact keyword match links from article directories and other sites, but not an exceptional amount.

It could be the case here that Google is not penalizing your site here, simply de-valuing the low quality links that were pointing at you before.  If that's the case, just work on building some better links with diverse anchor text.

If you still have contact with the SEO company that built the links, they may also have the account information for the sites that your links were added to, which should help you remove them if you want.

Here are some other recent threads on link removal:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-anyone-have-any-suggestions-on-removing-spammy-links

http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-can-low-quality-links-be-removed

It looks like you submitted a reconsideration request?  Did you see an overall traffic drop across your site, or just for that one keyword?

Did they specifically tell you you were penalized, or did you just receive an "unnatural link warning" like thousands of other webmasters?  Because those two things are very different.

From doing a site: search of your domain and searching for your branded keywords, it doesn't appear that you are penalized.  Did you see a drop in traffic overall, or just a loss of rankings for that one keyword?

Are people still linking to you at your old .htm pages?  Then you should keep the 301s in place.  There's no need to "clean up" your .htaccess.

If you decide to remove the 301s anyway and start seeing a lot of 404s in Webmaster Tools, that's a good indication you should put the 301s back in place.

Any examples of pages that are blocked?  I don't see any pages being specifically blocked in your robots.txt: http://www.jobshadow.com/robots.txt

For nofollow, it's perfectly normal to nofollow thousands of links if you get a lot of comments.

Rather than removing links, it can also make sense to build your way out of the penalty, that is building more links with natural anchor text rather than focusing on removing the poor ones.

Exact match domains are definitely still worth it.  Check out this case study on a couple thousand sites, which shows that exact match domains suffered LESS from Penguin than other sites:

http://www.jonathanleger.com/anchor-text-optimization-how-much-is-too-much/

Penguin tends penalize sites that spam anchor text exact keywords, instead of a more natural link profile that includes your branded keywords.  However, when your brand IS your keywords, then it's very hard for Google to penalize you.

Gotta disagree with this one.  Creating high quality blog content with the same keywords you are targeting on your products page can be a good strategy.  The blog post will add more content related to your keyword on your site, increasing relevancy.  It's also a lot easier to build links to a blog than a product page.

Just make sure to link from the blog post to the product page, and the product page can get a boost.  If you rank really high in Google, you could even get 2 listings for that keyword.  If for some reason the blog content outranks the product page, you can just take that same content and throw it on the product page with a canonical from the blog post.  If all else fails, you can 301 redirect it.

If you are using Wordpress, there is also a plugin called RSS Footers which allows you to put your link at the bottom of all your syndicated posts, so even if they are scraped they will link back to you.

500 words seems pretty short, are you sure these are high quality articles?

What are you doing to promoted these articles?  Are you sending out e-mails to other people in your niche that would be interested in your articles?  Contacting them on Twitter and other social media?  Posting your article to social bookmarking sites?  Submitting your articles to news sites for your niche?

Like Donnie said, you can just build it and expect people to find it.  Make great stuff and do some outreach.  If that doesn't get you any traction, maybe your content isn't being received by your audience as well as you thought it would be.

Yes, directory submissions are completely white hat (unless you're spamming anchor text) if they're reputable.

To make sure that a directory is in Google's good graces:

1. Do a site: search to make sure they are indexed
2. Search for their brand name, to make sure they aren't penalized
3. If it's a paid directory, look to see that you are paying for manual review and not paying for a link

On the off chance that the directory gets penalized, your will not be penalized, their link will just stop passing value.  Unless you're submitting your site to hundreds of directories, you should be safe.