On more than one occasion I've seen search traffic increase after the switch, although that could just be the SSL factor contrasting the small juice leak, not sure. Immediate increase - like, as soon as the new URLs are indexed.
As for the insiders building sites because they know the "magic": in reality how much would that actually mean in a real life example? I mean, I think we all know that to have a long term ranking property, there aren't any "shortcuts". There might be tricks to learn, but I'd wager that every...
Outreach to blogs today is sorta similar to me as outreach was for "link exchange" back in the early '00s. Others have already touched on this, but for me personally, the best way to get me to do something is to be adamant about getting in touch. And keep being friendly.
I also get outreach...
Just to extend on what RomesFall said about date and author pages etc.: The Yoast plugin has options for this, and also to completely deactivate them and simply redirect to the main category or wherever.
Ideally you'd plug in a site that has authority -- something like BBC, Techcrunch or similar (whatever niche or industry you're targetting). Problem is, lots know this and custom made tools will most likely do a better job at this than Xenu, so for me I go more niche and try to think of (and...
It's obvious to anyone that automation takes out the work you're doing. That wasn't really my point.
If you're not savvy enough or want to/have the money to spend to either build it yourself or have someone do it for you, my above post can be a solution that actually works.
If you're not against a bit of manual work, I've had alot of luck manually scanning sites using Xenu.
Input site into Xenu, watch for "no such host" on the output (export to tabulated data and insert into Excel for easy sorting), check which are not regged and bulk enter them into tools such as...
This is super relevant to my interests.
Having the exact same problem with one of my better sites. It's gotten to a point now where I can't really go on faking it, and it's for the same reasons as you ashref -- personal outreach.
What I have done so far though, is to have the pen name as the...