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@billslawski Hi Bill, It's great to see you. I hope you are doing well.

Most of my domains are on the registrar's automatic renewal. Although I have a couple domains set to automatic renewal but I have prepaid them out beyond my reasonable lifetime - cause I don't want to rely on the registrar and I don't want to take a chance that I might forget. If I get SEO benefit for that, great!

I would increase the amount of great content and improve the quality of the content that is already in place.  Content is what people link to.  Great content = quality links = high DA.

I would not call it nefarious.  I would simply call it duplicate content that Google will not be pleased with.  Google can see lazy efforts to get links - and you are giving a reward to people who accommodate you.   It's duplicate content.  Google will likely ignore most of it.  If you do this at scale don't be surprised if none of these links are counted.

If you stop doing the things that cause the DMCA hits and start over on a new domain then this problem will be gone.

I agree.  Get Hemingway or Grammerly and rewrite from scratch without looking at the original.

Yes, you can make lots of changes to an article after it is posted.

When I am working on an article, I upload it as soon as a have a top image and a couple paragraphs.  Then, over the next few days, I upload sections of the article as I get them finished.

I often edit sections within a day of their first upload.

Two or three years later, I often find something new to add to the article.  At that time I add the new material and give the entire article a critical reading that usually includes lots of updates and new information.   I believe that these are often immediately beneficial to rankings.

I don't know if rewriting a couple hundred articles to capture the ad income from a few thousand sessions per month will be a good use of anyone's time.

Does this site have a another stream of income?   Paid links, perhaps?

The image is property of XYZ company.  If you want to use it you will need to contact them for permission.  Or offer to pay them a license fee.  Or do whatever they ask in exchange for its use.

Many images are not available for use by anyone no matter how much you offer to pay.

Using images belonging to another company can result in civil or criminal liability.  If you willfully use an image, knowing that you are not entitled to use it, you can be liable for damages of up to $150,000 per image.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_damages_for_copyright_infringement

Lots of people steal my images.  We file DMCA claims with Google search, complain to Google Adsense, and complain to hosting companies.  Those complaints result in images and the pages where they appear being blocked from search, removed from servers, or Adsense being turned off on those pages or on the entire website.  Those are easy  for a copyright owner to accomplish.  If repeated infringement occurs, I have an attorney who is ready to file formal complaints.    We have done these things hundreds of times.

So, get permission, use a stock photo, get a camera and take your own photos.  We spend thousands of dollars every month on images and will do what we need to do to protect our property.

If the rankings of the criminal defense pages have direct links then those links are helpful to any query that any page of the site competes for.  So, I would not delete them.

There are law firms with strong websites that rule the SERPs for everything in their town.   Their office takes any call that comes in, accepts the cases in practice areas where they have interest and expertise, and refers the rest to other firms for a referral fee.

We get tons of content offers.  Many offer to pay us.   Some offer free content.   In over 20 years, we have only accepted a few of these offers.    Here are the reasons...

1. First...  99% of the time the content is far below our editorial standards.   Trash.  Prattle.  We would be ashamed to publish it.  It is so bad we are not even interested in working with them.

2. We are not interested in being a platform for link builders.  If they are building links with articles we know that they might be doing enough of that to get in trouble with Google.    Google knows that people use articles, guest posts, etc. to build unnatural links.  Just today at Search Engine RoundTable, Barry had a post about that - saying that links in guest posts should be nofollowed.

I will say that we have received golden content offered to us.   Content of the highest quality.  But, the authors of this content simply wanted to have their content on our website, so they could share their work with our visitors.  These were professors and scholars who are all about writing and publishing.    They did not have links in the content to their personal websites or to employer websites, or to any websites that might be concerned about links.  These authors knew nothing about links.  One gave us three or four articles and we then starting paying him to write about topics that we needed.   His articles have been some of the best performing on our website.

Right now I have a dilema.   A highly qualified author with excellent content repeatedly emailing to get his article published.  But, he is with a website that is hard core linkbuilders and they will get angry if I nofollow their links.  So, I will keep deleting his emails.

You compete in a very aggressive space with lots of professional muscle.  The SEOs in this space are experienced, hungry, savvy and sometimes tricky.  The sites that you compete against have enormous development budgets and can toss teams of people into a project.  Their authors produce best-on-the-web content with first class authorship, fantastic maps, great photos and more.   I could go on and on.

You don't reveal this in your post but my question is.....

What are you doing that will put you on a footing to compete with these cannibals - even in small niches?

SEO in the travel area is a "Battle of Resources".

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Some suggestions after a quick look at your site...

-- I think that your on-page optimization needs kicked up a notch.  I would read the SEOmoz guide.  Run the optimization tool in the rankings checker.  The terms that you are gunning for based upon title tags are not even present on some of the pages that I visited.  You are competing against the cannibals. Sharpen your knife!

-- What are you putting on this site that will stand apart in your niche and attract links?  I see lots of short content with chest thumping.  How about some real meat about your destinations?  For example, you offer a Galapagos tour but I can't find much about why people would want to visit that destination...  What are they going to see... what important things happened there.. why are these islands some of the most unique rocks on this planet..  Walk in the steps of Darwin and share some of his observations... the history of the place, conservation, iguanas, boobies, tortoise, flightless cormorants, tropical penguins., the unique environment... people are fascinated with volcanoes!    I hope that your tour guides know about all of this stuff and are ready to sing about it.    Convince me that you are the tour company that should take me.  I am not convinced that you know what is there.  I wanna be sure that I get my money's worth and make good use of my time.  I am not convinced that you know enough about this destination to teach me anything.  Tell me the story that will get my blood pumping to visit and ready to reach for my wallet!

-- Give people pages that they can link to from their FB wall and say... I AM GOING HERE!  WOW!  Eat your heart out!

-- What are you doing to make this site exceptionally easy to share via social media?  I can't find the buttons... oh...  there are a couple darked out ones waaaay down in the bottom of the footer.  Nobody is looking down there... put them up high were everyone will see them and get their mouse on them quickly.

-- Don't advertise an empty forum at the top of your site.  Get some action in there.  Have your guides post some conversation starters.  Have them invite questions.  Ask a few satisfied travellers to share their experience. Visitors are going to leave if they look in there now.

-- On your chat page get CENTRAL TIME right up there with the times of operation.  People don't know if your chat team is in London, Tokyo or Peoria.

-- You say that your traffic is down year-over-year.  Have you looked into analytics to see if your rankings have dropped, if your long tail has fallen, where was that lost traffic coming from.   Just guessing, I think that you are losing it to competitors in your niche who are aggressively building best-on-the-web content that attracts lots of heavy links and scoops long tail traffic away from other websites.  Also, even small websites in your niche are building pages with substantive content that are optimized for specific keywords like finely crafted arrows.

-- Finally, your destinations each had several pages of information and when I clicked from one to another they were slow to load and did not have a consistent look and feel.  I recommend a seamless format and am wondering if the big juicy photo at the top is the way to go.  They are great photos but they are pushing your content way down and are not consistent from page to page.... I wondered if I was still on the right part of the site.

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I know that I poked really hard at you in my reply.  But in this niche you got to go for their throats because they are already reaching for yours.

Good luck.

Links in .pdf documents will be displayed in your Google Webmaster Tools Backlinks, they will accumulate pagerank (I have some PR6 pdf documents), and they will pass pagerank.

It is a good idea to place links into .pdf documents that you give away on the web not only for pagerank reasons but also to give users an easy link to visit your site for more information.  Think about usability when you create .pdf documents in the same ways that you think about usability for your website.

Also, if you complete the "properties" attributes of .pdf documents you can give them a title that will appear in the SERPs like a title tag on an .html webpage.  I get lots of traffic from the SERPs that come straight into my .pdf documents and then click a link in the document that takes them to a relevant page on my website.

Finally... in addition to .pdf documents you can also get viable backlinks and clickthroughs from .ppt (PowerPoint) .xls (Excel) and other types of files.  Consider allowing other webmasters to include them on their site.  That way they can bring you links from other domains.

As Ben says... start by reading the Beginner's Guide to SEO.

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Then start working on a website, or a couple of websites.

Experiment with them by changing the title tag, adding more content to some of the pages, reoptimizing.

As you work on them, keep an SEO Log and write down the changes that you make and the dates that you make them.  Watch how it influences rankings.  If you do this diligently you will learn more from this than any reading.

If you are learning you should discover that your website now sucks because your knowledge has grown.  That is a great thing.  Rebuild the site.  You will probably be amazed with the results.

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Install google analytics on these websites and become a student of the sources of traffic and the queries that people type in.   When you improve a 200 word page to a 500 word page watch for the explosion of new long tail keywords that flood in.  Watch how great content holds visitors and crap content bounces them.  ( I spend a few hours a week on this - even after ten years watching the same sites.)

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Pick a subject that you are very familiar with and enjoy.  Then create the best content on the web for that topic and post it on your site.  Watch where it ranks right away (you will probably be disappointed).  Check the rankings about once a week and watch what happens.  You will be impressed with what happens to quality. But, be patient as this type of content rises very slowly in the SERPs -- but in 6 to 12 to 24 months you will be surprised where it ranks.

Be careful that you don't deceive yourself into thinking that your content is the best when it is merely pedestrian.  Be prepared to keep it up-to-date and to improve it when someone else trumps it.

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Pick a good SEO forum and visit once a day.   Watch for people who come there posting titles like... "Wah!  My site lost tons of traffic."   Read all of those for a while and you will quickly start to see patterns.  You will generally find that they have committed some type of sin, usually with links or shortcuts.  Do not repeat their sins no matter how tempting.  Then after each google update read the post of the people who are cryin' and you will soon learn that google is smacking down a different type of shortcut and that google rarely smacks down quality that is difficult to produce.

While you are on these forums never listen closely to all of the advice, because lots of the advice in SEO forums is really bad advice - even when it comes from gurus and oracles.  Nobody understands google perfectly and most advice given is shooting from the hip with fragmentary data - especially if the advisor has not spend a lot of time on your website and studied your analytics carefully over time.

Spend a couple hours a week poking into busy forums.  You will learn a lot, find strong allies and trusted people who will be worth hiring for jobs where you lack expertise.

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After you think you have learn an awful lot, go back and reread the Beginner's Guide to SEO with a great desire to improve.  You will probably discover again that you website sucks.  This is a good thing.  Don't hesitate to rebuild properly because you will most likely receive a great reward.

I like this subject, Steve.

I think that the answer to your question will be mainly determined by the type of traffic (people) who find there way into SEOmoz Q&A.

I posted for many years at another popular SEO forum and at least 90% of the questions there today are based upon misconception - and almost 90% of the answers given there are not answers that you would endorse.

I am spending almost all of my forum time here, now.  I burned out on seeing really bad answers being given and people going out to use that information.  And, often when someone posted a correct, very generous and technically correct reply the person asking the question would argue to the point of insult.   (This does not mean that every answer that I gave was correct - I post to learn and want to hear other opinions when I am wrong.)

The sad part is that many of those people have websites on SEO domain names and are offering their SEO expertise for hire.

The difference here at SEOmoz is that most of the forum participants are paying to post or have earned enough MozPoints to have a little competence behind them. And, SEOmoz is not allowing signature links and seems to be killing spammy links added to questions/answers.

I firmly agree that many of the wrong types of questions are being asked here.  However, I am happy to see a lot of high quality advice being given out by you and many others.  I think that will help the people who ask the questions redirect their thinking into more profitable routes.   Also, the people who receive that advice are generally say "thank you"  and will mark "good answer" when they think that it is helpful.

Will it continue?  Probably a steady flow of it will happen as new members arrive.  Hopefully lots of those members will continue to post after they acquire a little knowledge and success.

But the real answer, I believe, will depend again on the traffic (people).  Will the questions be interesting and varied enough to hold the interest of experience people?  Where will the new members come from?  That depends upon the "barrier to entry" of money or MozPoints... also holding the policy of not allowing signature links on every post (the people who go after them don't know about  "nofollow").

Also, any linkbuilder who accepts a job from a webmaster who demands "guaranteed results" needs his head examined.

That link builder has no control over what your competitors are doing and no control over what you might do to stink up your own site.

I can't guarantee my own results so how is a linkbuilder going to guarantee yours?

As long as there are search engines, a person who understands how they work will have an enormous advantage over the ignorant person who just tosses up a website.

I bet Forbes.com would get a lot more traffic if I was doing their SEO.

I have lots of double listings... some triple and some quadruple.

I view keyword cannibalization as an opportunity to dominate the SERPs rather than something to be avoided.

Would you like to own the top three positions in google?  Tell the truth!

All of the searchers will click into your site because they see your dominance and say... This guy is The Widget Man!

The way that happens is to have three strong pages for the same keyword.

Let's imagine that you have a website about widgets on the domain of egol.com.

"Brass Widgets" are your favorite.  You have a page about the history of brass widgets, another about brass widgets in the news.  Your title tags might be....

Homepage:  Brass Widgets by EGOL

News Page:  Brass Widgets in the News!

History Page:  Brass Widgets History

There you have it... a strong homepage, strong history page and your homepage all have enough power to rank in the top ten.  Your homepage has enough power to rank #1.  There you have earned #1, #2 and #3 for "brass widgets"..

Nothing wrong with that... a great way to run your competitors out of town.

Now let's say you also have information about "wooden widgets"... and "plastic widgets"... and.... "aluminum widgets...you have the same type of news pages for wooden, plastic and aluminum, the same type of history pages and your homepage title tag says...

EGOL's Widgets:  Wooden, Plastic, Aluminum and Brass

If you have all of this widget MoJo you might rank #1 for "widgets"

A final word on anchor text.....  link to your brass news page with "Brass Widgets News" or "News about Brass Widgets"... similar for history.  This is not duplicate anchor text but the targeted keywords (brass widgets) appear in different context.    Works great. Don't worry about it.  Try it. Dominate your SERPs!

Added later:  This tactic works best for search queries that contain two words.  That allows you to have three word anchor text.  My luck has not been as good for three and four word queries as that is when I believe that cannibalization becomes a problem.

No matter what you are buying you should consider your intended use.

If you are buying nails you should know that roofing nails, finishing nails and concrete nails are designed for different uses and can not be substituted for one another.

Even buying a commodity like manure requires one to pay attention.  Some types of manure will produce abundant weeds in your garden, others will burn your plants, a few types have the proper amount of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium to energize your soil.  See here for an author who can write about this fine topic.

If you need someone to write about nails find a person who knows a lot about using a hammer.  If you need someone to wrote about manure find someone who knows his shit.

The average writer will not do a very good job at writing about nails or about manure.  They will have to do a lot of research and even then people who really know their stuff will immediately recognize a noob trying to pretend he is a farmer.

Who but Google could provide better information about Google?  And, since Google is going to make money from your ads they should do their best to direct you to the proper keywords.

If I was planning to spend $6000, I would not spend it on press releases or blog/forum spamming.

You asked which would generate more traffic and which would contribute more to domain authority.  I think that press releases and blog spamming are wastes of money for both of those purposes.

WIth $6000 to spend I would rather spend $2000 on really comfy chairs for the content writers, $2000 on a new camera/lighting equipment for the photographer, $2000 on licenses to Mindjet or new a graphics program or other productivity software.  I'd also chip in for a fancy coffee machine and cold drinks for the refrigerator.

These are "sharpening the ax" at the most basic level.