I think there is still a ton of value. Even if the links aren't valuable, I'd still look into the value of your company being mentioned in a release and the traffic generated to your site.

If you focus on providing some value and an interesting story, you may be able to generate a good amount of traffic to your site. From here, you should have a method for capturing visitors and getting them to engage you, both on your blog and in social media.

However, if you are looking at it as purely a method of gaining links, it has lost the value that it once held.

I'd suggest starting with a whole new domain or using the unused one. If he has had penalties that lost him rankings then you are starting from scratch, or worse, by trying to fix the rankings for his current domain anyways. This way you avoid losing that first place position, which I am almost certain will happen for a period of time once you make the switch.

If you start a whole new site, he can maintain that first place ranking until the new site takes its place.

Like Andy mentioned, he could also run some PPC ads at the same time. Which he could be doing on Bing and Google to alleviate some of the lost traffic anyways.

Three sites you could try are:trafficestimate .com

websitetrafficspy .com

statshow .com

(delete the space in the URL of course). These are of course are only estimates of traffic. You can see by looking at moz.com, for example, on each site that you have a range of ~23,000,000 to ~48,000,000 monthly visitors.

You may also want to try Google Trends. This will give you a much larger view if you are looking for trends over a couple of years in order to identify patterns over months.

I just did a search for both of your examples and it appears that the answer is, yes. You should be perfectly fine whichever way you go. However, if you know that your audience/customers/prospects use a specific way of writing the keyword over the other, then that will be the one you should go with.

Google will have to spider the site before any loss in rankings due to design, right? So, if there is a drop in rankings, it won't necessarily be recovered in a re-index.

But, so long as there are no errors and the site remains the same structurally and content wise, there shouldn't necessarily be any issue. Even if there are no errors with the new theme as far as SEO goes, if the new design affects the load speed, this could affect the ranking of your page.

I agree with Federico, the styling should be fixed through CSS and probably before you start doing any other work. Making these changes really shouldn't take that long.

Since the site owner is wanting SEO done for his site, he/she would probably listen to your advice on getting the site cleaned up as soon as possible. Just state the issue and let them know that this problem is potentially costing them money.

You should be completely fine. If for some reason there is a duplicate content issue, Google will just show whichever it thinks is the original video. Giving them different titles and descriptions should also help to differentiate them.

Since you are hoping to take advantage of search for your videos, it will be helpful to link from one of your videos to the other. I'd suggest putting a link on the Vimeo (on the Vimeo site) version pointing to the YouTube version, since that is the one you are hoping to rank.

I don't think this will have any effect at all in terms of how the search engines view your site. However, something to consider is that if your visitors are turned off by it and your time on site is less or your pages have a high bounce rate, this may factor into your rankings.

I have heard that some splitting done in regards to white text on a black background revealed lower conversion rates and higher bounce rates.

Just something to consider.

I agree with Mike. Stay away from automated tools if possible. One of the major social bookmarking sites is StumbleUpon, I believe you can also promote pages on their site as well. Just like every other social site, you will want to be somewhat active and contribute in order to get the best value.

You should be completely fine. If for some reason there is a duplicate content issue, Google will just show whichever it thinks is the original video. Giving them different titles and descriptions should also help to differentiate them.

Since you are hoping to take advantage of search for your videos, it will be helpful to link from one of your videos to the other. I'd suggest putting a link on the Vimeo (on the Vimeo site) version pointing to the YouTube version, since that is the one you are hoping to rank.

I just did a search for both of your examples and it appears that the answer is, yes. You should be perfectly fine whichever way you go. However, if you know that your audience/customers/prospects use a specific way of writing the keyword over the other, then that will be the one you should go with.

The first example that comes to mind is Freecreditreport .com which actually is ranked #2 for the term 'free credit report'. I have never heard of search engines marking certain words as spammy. You should be perfectly okay.

I agree with Mike. Stay away from automated tools if possible. One of the major social bookmarking sites is StumbleUpon, I believe you can also promote pages on their site as well. Just like every other social site, you will want to be somewhat active and contribute in order to get the best value.

Three sites you could try are:trafficestimate .com

websitetrafficspy .com

statshow .com

(delete the space in the URL of course). These are of course are only estimates of traffic. You can see by looking at moz.com, for example, on each site that you have a range of ~23,000,000 to ~48,000,000 monthly visitors.

I don't think this will have any effect at all in terms of how the search engines view your site. However, something to consider is that if your visitors are turned off by it and your time on site is less or your pages have a high bounce rate, this may factor into your rankings.

I have heard that some splitting done in regards to white text on a black background revealed lower conversion rates and higher bounce rates.

Just something to consider.

Google will have to spider the site before any loss in rankings due to design, right? So, if there is a drop in rankings, it won't necessarily be recovered in a re-index.

But, so long as there are no errors and the site remains the same structurally and content wise, there shouldn't necessarily be any issue. Even if there are no errors with the new theme as far as SEO goes, if the new design affects the load speed, this could affect the ranking of your page.

I think there is still a ton of value. Even if the links aren't valuable, I'd still look into the value of your company being mentioned in a release and the traffic generated to your site.

If you focus on providing some value and an interesting story, you may be able to generate a good amount of traffic to your site. From here, you should have a method for capturing visitors and getting them to engage you, both on your blog and in social media.

However, if you are looking at it as purely a method of gaining links, it has lost the value that it once held.