Agreed. From a branding/UX perspective it is key. I'm just making sure there isn't anything that can hurt things. Like you said though -- if it's for the user and natural it should be fine.

Many of the big guns like 1800 Flowers, Diapers.com and others all have their sister sites in tabs at the top.

Example: http://www.diapers.com/ with their 3 other properties.

Since all properties link to one another on every page, it's really a wash, right? No real gain as engines know they are connected and it's the same link multiple times. No real problem either as it's natural for the user experience to have reciprocal links here between the brands.

Any additional thoughts here?

Ha, I agree, though I think it gradually starts skewing in one direction.

You may find some helpful comments on a discussion I started last week. We were in a situation where we are starting a new video/content blog with issues putting it on the root. Finally made the decision to move to a platform that allows us more flexibility with this (for this and other reason).

http://www.seomoz.org/q/a-blog-structure-dilemma-we-re-facing

1. I don't see how having the local number re-direct to the 1800 would be an issue, from an on-page SEO perspective. As long as Google is seeing the local area code that is consistent with the area you should be fine. For Google Maps there may be a different answer.

2. Why couldn't they remove the 800 number, or at least have both?

Agreed. And focus on best practices for local or regional optimization. If your business is only really focused in Charlotte, for instance, there are many other things you can do to help with this geo optimization.

You should be fine. I think Google is going to get smarter and smarter at recognizing the same video, but if it's relevant to the page and there is other supporting content, it is adding to the user experience and you'll be ok.

Another option to consider on certain videos is to create a 2nd video (in Wistia). Essentially it's the same upload, but a new file with unique title/description etc. YouTube doesn't let you do this, but you'll be fine in Wistia. This could come into play if there is the same video with a sightly different context that needs to be on 2 pages.

One question I'm pondering is the situation where a 'how to' video get's the attention of prominent bloggers. Let's say 15 big blogs in your industry all use the embed code (if you make it available) to post the video in a post of their own. This A) should benefit with by receiving a backlink, but B) does this complicate the waters from the Search Engine's perspective? I guess it's still on your video sitemap, and Google should know that you're the original source.

We just started on Wistia, after a few years on BrightCove and experience with a bunch of others. Pretty cool platform, plus I hear a new (and much more flexible) player is coming out in December. Exciting!

We're rolling out quite a bit of pro video and hosting on a 3-party platform/player (likely BrightCove) that also allows us to have the URL reside on our domain.

Here is a scenario for a particular video asset:

A. It's on a product page that the video is relevant for.

B. We have an entry on our blog with the video

C. We have a separate section of our site "Video Library" that provides a centralized view of all videos. It's there too.

D. We eventually give the video to other sites (bloggers, industry educational sites etc) for outreach and link-building.

A through C on our domain are all for user experience as every page is very relevant, but are there any duplicate video issues here? We would likely only have the transcript on the product page (though we're open to suggestions).

Any related feedback would be appreciated. We want to make this scalable and done properly from the beginning (will be rolling out 1000+ videos in 2010)