Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I feel your pain. I've worked with some very large companies, and getting anything done, especially content generation, was a slow role.

You're always going to be dealing with a "committee" with a larger company.

I worked with a large healthcare client on their blog, among other things. To get them going, I would do the research and come up with ideas and topic summaries for them to then write from. Granted, it was more work for me, but after a while they started catching on and getting more proactive.

Plus, it helped when they saw the positive effects as a result of some of the content (specifically in the social realm).

That's a far better response.

Good intel.

From everything I've read, I agree that your safest bet is to go with the subfolder.

I wouldn't think this would fall into a potentially harmful duplicate content issue. Since people are searching within these video sites, too, I would think it'd have more of a beneficial effect from a brand awareness standpoint.

I think, based on the bits I've read here and there, that it's more about diversity and quantity than the actual anchor text itself. If you're flooding the web with paid links, and Google sees too much of the exact same anchor text, then that's where you could get into trouble.

My advice would be to mix anchor text up as much as possible. Use a combination of keywords, brand names and URLs and see where that takes you.

I don't know if this is the most educated advice, but I think it's a "safe" way to continue.

Agreed. I can't stand seeing this. Hopefully, nowadays I'd think this'll be harder to do simply because so many domain names will be taken.

That's what I'm thinking based on what I'm seeing - most of the high ranking sites are pretty bad overall. Lot of old, early 2000 looking sites and all that goes with that.

I'm currently in the beginning stages of doing SEO analysis for a new client. They're an IT support company here in Phoenix, AZ.

In doing some keyword research and competitive research, I've noticed that one of their competitors (who ranks in the top 3 for many of the targeted keywords), is doing something that I thought would surely be a duplicate content issue.

On their home page, they have dozens of links of zip codes in the Phoenix area. Each link leads to a page devoted to that zip code. Each page is identical, except that the zip code is changed in the header tag. Most of these zip code pages are indexed in Google.

Isn't this an example of duplicate content, or better yet, content spamming? I've seen this thing quite a bit with high ranking sites, and I thought these were the kinds of things that were getting taken care of in the post "Panda" era.

I might just be misunderstanding this whole thing, but any guidance or intel would be greatly appreciated.

I feel your pain. I've worked with some very large companies, and getting anything done, especially content generation, was a slow role.

You're always going to be dealing with a "committee" with a larger company.

I worked with a large healthcare client on their blog, among other things. To get them going, I would do the research and come up with ideas and topic summaries for them to then write from. Granted, it was more work for me, but after a while they started catching on and getting more proactive.

Plus, it helped when they saw the positive effects as a result of some of the content (specifically in the social realm).

I wouldn't think this would fall into a potentially harmful duplicate content issue. Since people are searching within these video sites, too, I would think it'd have more of a beneficial effect from a brand awareness standpoint.

I think, based on the bits I've read here and there, that it's more about diversity and quantity than the actual anchor text itself. If you're flooding the web with paid links, and Google sees too much of the exact same anchor text, then that's where you could get into trouble.

My advice would be to mix anchor text up as much as possible. Use a combination of keywords, brand names and URLs and see where that takes you.

I don't know if this is the most educated advice, but I think it's a "safe" way to continue.