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Great replies, thank you very much!

Thanks for the responses!

Just to be clear:  I'm not talking about hosting a video on YouTube and then embedding it (via the YouTube embed code) onto my product page.  Doing this will never result in my site page ranking with a video thumbnail.

Instead, I'm talking about hosting the video on my own domain independently of YouTube (via Wistia or Amazon S3) and then creating a Video Sitemap to try to get google to rank my own domain page with the video thumbnail.

In addition, I'd be hosting the same video on YouTube as well for the additional exposure.

I've got a pretty good handle on the pros / cons of hosting on videos on a free service like YouTube vs. hosting them independently with something like Wistia. But one question I've never heard answered is "Why not host the same video both ways?"

Why wouldn't I publish a video to YouTube (to get the exposure and better chance to rank) and then also host the same video independently on my site  with Wistia (to get a second listing in the SERPs, as well as a thumbnail that links to my site)?

Is this seen as a spammy practice?  Duplicate content?  Would love to hear your thoughts on this as it's something that seems to potentially be a win-win, but haven't heard it discussed.

Thanks!

Slava,

Thanks for your reply.  I'm still very curious if there is a recommended limit to the number of internal links on a page.  If anyone could comment on this, that would be appreciated.

We are getting ready to re-launch our e-commerce site and are trying to decide how many products to list per category page.  Some of of our category pages have upwards of 100 products.  While I'd love to list ALL the products on the root category page (to reduce hassle for customer, to index more products on a higher PR page), I'm a little worried about having it be too long, and containing too many on-page links.

Would love some guidance on:

• Maximum number of internal links on a page

• If Google frowns on really long category pages

• Anything else I should be considering when making this decision

Thanks for your input!

Great Answer, thanks Phil!  One follow-up question:

In my robots.txt for the development site, I have the following:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Is this the correct configuration for the robots.txt file to accomplish what I want, that being removing the entire site from being crawled and from the exiting index?  Or should I be configuring it differently?

Also, good tip on Webmaster Tools.  I'll be request removal there as well.

We are currently developing a new version of our website and to make it easy to access for all team members, we just set it up on a server accessible via a publicly accessible domain name (ie devsite.com).  There has been no SEO and no links created to this site, or so I thought.

Recently, I found out that Google somehow found its way to this development site and has been indexing the pages!  I was a little alarmed, as there are no links to the domain and we'll soon be transitioning all the content over to our primary production domain.

I immediately created a robots.txt file to disallow access to the entire development domain.  My fear is that there may be some duplicate content penalty if Google sees that the content that is on our new site (once it goes live and is pushed to our REAL domain name) was previously indexed on our test domain.

We're slated to launch in 2-3 weeks.  Is there anything else I should do?  Should I even be worried?  I'm probably a bit paranoid, but given the amount of time and effort that has gone into this new site, I love any advice or thoughts.

Thank You!

Ryan,

Thanks for the fast and thoughtful reply!  With regards to your comments:

We would be using Javascript to "show" the HTML div that contains the the dropdown navigation sub-category links, but the links themselves are in static HTML blocks.  I "think" this would qualify for an appropriate / SEO friendly use of Javascript, but would love your confirmation as well.  

As far as the balance goes, that's what I'm struggling with.  The best UX would definitely be to just simply include the brand name in the navigation structure after a tennis racket header (i.e. Tennis Rackets ->  Wilson), but with the navigation links appearing on every page on the site, it is hard to pass up s perfectly targeted anchor text repeated over and over.  I can always use other links to build authority, but is seems like there is a lot of "power" in the navigation, it's a waste to misuse it.

I'm currently evaluating our navigation in the course of a site relaunch. From reading a number of articles and posts on seoMOZ, here are the elements I've found important to consider:

1. Use CSS (not Javascript) for the primary drop-down navigation menu

2. Get rid of two design elements from our earlier days:  The 30 something site-wide category links in the footer, and many no-followed internal links (in an attempt to sculpt PR)

3. Keep all pages within 3 clicks of the homepage, and have ample cross-links within internal pages.

The one major problem I'm facing is how to balance UX and SEO in the primary navigation bar. To illustrate, let's assume I sell Tennis equipment.  If one of the top-level categories on my navigation bar was "Rackets", if I was designing purely with SEO in mind the category names would be:

Tennis Rackets ->

Wilson Tennis Rackets

Head Tennis Rackets

Prince Tennis Rackets

....as the full, three word anchor text will be most specific and valuable to pass reputation to the category pages.  However, from a UX perspective, writing "Tennis Rackets" after each category is unnecessary, and it would look MUCH cleaner to instead have:

Tennis Rackets ->

Wilson

Head

Prince

....but this would obviously be less beneficial from a SEO standpoint for each individual, manufacturer racquet page as the entire search term ("Wilson Tennis Rackets") is not in the anchor text.  As these links will be on every page of the site, I'm struggling with which to choose - clean navigation or improved SEO.

My Questions:  I would love to hear the communities thoughts on how to weigh the balance of these two - clean UX navigation vs. SEO-rich specific anchor text - in navigation.  Also, I'd appreciate hearing if any of my original 3 assumptions for the re-design are off-base or incorrect.

Thank you!

Bryce,

Thanks for your reply!  A follow-up question:

Is the best way to do 300+ page-to-page redirects simply by entering them all into the .htacess file?  If so, how long do I need to keep these .htaccess redirects available?  Once Google indexes them, and indexes the redirects, will they be permanently stored in the Google cache?  Or should I leave them permanently just in case?

We are getting ready to re-launch our e-commerce site and are trying to decide how many products to list per category page.  Some of of our category pages have upwards of 100 products.  While I'd love to list ALL the products on the root category page (to reduce hassle for customer, to index more products on a higher PR page), I'm a little worried about having it be too long, and containing too many on-page links.

Would love some guidance on:

• Maximum number of internal links on a page

• If Google frowns on really long category pages

• Anything else I should be considering when making this decision

Thanks for your input!

Background:

My e-commerce site uses a lot of layered navigation and sorting links.  While this is great for users, it ends up in a lot of URL variations of the same page being crawled by Google.  For example, a standard category page:

www.mysite.com/widgets.html

...which uses a "Price" layered navigation sidebar to filter products based on price also produces the following URLs which link to the same page:

http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=1%2C250

http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=2%2C250

http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=3%2C250

As there are literally thousands of these URL variations being indexed, so I'd like to use Robots.txt to disallow these variations.

Question:

1. Is this a wise thing to do?  Or does Google take into account layered navigation links by default, and I don't need to worry.

2. To implement, I was going to do the following in Robots.txt:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /*?

Disallow: /*=

....which would prevent any dynamic URL with a '?" or '=' from being indexed.  Is there a better way to do this, or is this a good solution?

Thank you!