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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!

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!

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!

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: Use CSS (not Javascript) for the primary drop-down navigation menu 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) 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!

We are getting ready to move our e-commerce platform from Zencart to Magento as the original Zencart framework is pretty dated.   while I'm excited to move to a more modern platform, I'm terrified at the potential SEO risk involved with doing so given that all URLs will likely be different and we're considering updating many product listings.  Almost all of the site's traffic is organic, so maintaining rankings is extremely important. I'd love any advice, but especially that related to: Best way to redirect all new URLs sitewide The prudence of heavily editing product listings at the same time of redirecting the URL (i.e. updating product descriptions) Site structure:  Should I strive to keep the new site link structure as similar to the old as possible? Resources or guides on transitioning a site from a SEO perspective Other major facets I'm missing I appreciate any help or sights you can offer!   Thank you....

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: 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. 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!

HI All, I am a new user to SEO moz pro and I have a few questions I hope you can help me with. We are adding a new product category to an existing site and I am wondering what tools to use to track our SEO efforts to build ranking for these new products. I have already started a campaign that tracks the ranking of our primary keywords but I am wondering if there are other tools I should be using as well. Currently our SEO strategy is centered around link building. I have been approaching sites that have content related to our products and offering to write articles, guest blogs, and create educational resources that benefit the sites users and have specific anchor text linking back to our site. Since we are trying to build rank for a new category of products should I be linking to the general product category page or should I try to link to sub categories or individual products? Also I have used the juicy link finder to help me identify related sites that I can approach but I haven't received very many good leads. Is there a more specific way to use the tool or another tool that I should try? If you have any suggestions about other SEO strategies/activities that we should be pursuing please share your ideas! Thanks!