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Thanks so much! Exactly what I needed to know!

Like William said, no follow is your best bet, especially on low quality sites that you might be associated with.

Another help can be making this branded anchor text, as in just <a href="">Company Name</a>.

In all reality footer links do next to nothing for SEO as they are considered low quality links on the site (being so far down on the website and often associated with other links such as a footer menu). They can easily appear spammy.

They do serve as another linking domain which is helpful, but the best way to attribute your work is to ask the site owner for a simple paragraph in the about us explaining the website, how it was built, and by whom. This provides a non spammy contextual backlink that is one click away from the homepage. This kind of link will provide much more SEO benefit than any footer backlink.

I will be transitioning a lot of my copyright style links to something such as this.

Hope this helps.

I have checked out some great resources from Rand and others here on SEOMoz, as well as some other great articles written on YouMoz by you guys!

I have two questions when it comes to citations for Local SEO though.

I have heard that Google does not really take the address into consideration when indexing local citations. Instead it is a combination of the business name + phone number  + area code.

On one hand this makes a lot of sense as far as Google crunching all the information. You can achieve a fairly accurate citation with just those three things and still weed out a lot of the "brand mentions" as citations. However this conflicts with a lot of what I have been reading and watching as far as whiteboard Fridays and blogs here on SEOMoz.

Can someone provide some insight or sources concerning this?

Secondly, in case of  SEO and Web Design companies, such as ourselves, who do not receive the "One Box" for Google localized search, do citations play any lesser role in ranking for localized seo keywords?

I am not sure if there is a definitive answer to these questions or if they are open ended. Regardless any insight would be invaluable!

Does the analytics support specific city search terms targeting those city specific pages, or going to the home page (or the canonical version of the duplicate content page)?

If it is the later, then you certainly should move those city specific keyword terms into the single version of the duplicate content in some creative fashion.

Regardless you still should remove the duplicate content, preferably sooner than later because they are certainly low value pages!

Hey BobGW,

Rand covered outreach emails in a recent Whiteboard Friday if you have not had a chance to watch it yet. Although not 100% applicable to the void you mentioned, it should give some good insight on how to get that friendly conversation going.

If you are going through steps 1-6 as you mentioned, you should have no problem getting personal in your email outreach.

You can view the Whiteboard Friday here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-separates-a-good-outreach-email-from-a-great-one-whiteboard-friday

If your email outreach is done along these guidelines, I believe it should help with your conversions from the get-go.

Hope this helps