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Hi there,

John Doherty did a really good whiteboard friday on this last year:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday

Hi Bruce,

Just to add some detail into the mix here; for video hosting and embedding, SEOmoz uses Wistia (who you can a discount with your PRO package) which has some great SEO features and a very reliable (and cheap IMHO) transcription service.

I like this approach because, as Dana has pointed out, the content is excellent and the only way to get it is to come to the site - this encourages links, social shares etc.

The advantage to using YouTube however is that, in itself, YT is a gigantic search engine and therefore SEO opportunities are significant.

We host our video content using Wistia and embed on our site as well as posting to YT, but all of our inbound activity directs would-be viewers to the embedded pages.

Ultimately, depending on the content of the video, you have to consider where your audience is and what your objectives are in sharing it with the internet.

Good luck!

Whilst I can see you are looking to gain SEO advantage in your use of ALT text, your primary consideration should always be for the end user: If this image does not display, does the ALTernative text explain what was there?

You should be testing this with a text browser, or an emulator, to make sure it still makes sense.

Taking this approach should yield the best results.

Hi Ken,

I'm no definite expert on the duplicate content issue, but given that the other content on the page will be unique, my gut feel is that you will be fine.

With regards to the hosting, the answer is "it depends". Specifically, do you just want someone to watch the video, or do you want to get more value from it?

We use Wistia to host the majority of our videos and we get some great analytics (including heatmaps), can add email CTAs (priceless) to some of our content plus it looks more professional than YouTube. They do also have some great SEO tools that we don't utilise just yet.

Having said that, we also still upload all of our videos to YT (2nd largest search engine etc.).

You get a discount on Wistia in your Pro Perks.

I have come to understand  (perhaps incorrectly) that the "nofollow" attribute doesn't actually prevent a crawler from following the link, but merely that it disregards any relationship between the content on the source page and the destination. On this basis, using the "nofollow" attribute wouldn't affect your site on a per-folder basis, only that your internal linking will be affected from a SEO point of view.

To prevent a crawler from indexing a folder or sub-folder requires modifying your robots.txt file (Harald kindly linked to a good article on this) and using "disallow" on a parent folder does affect sub-folders using this method.

The answer is, rather unhelpfully at first glance, "it depends".

It depends on your overall objective for the content - what is the goal you are trying to achieve?

It depends on your audience location - are they organic searchers, social media sharers, youtube searchers, etc?

If your primary objective is to get people to your site (link building) and you're using the lure of video to incentivise this, then Phil's "don't do both" comment is spot on. If on the other hand you want as many people to watch the video as possible and make it accessible through as many channels (because you have a diverse audience base and you're not link building) then I think you can do both.

I would say that Phil has more experience at Video SEO than me so his comments certainly count double on mine for this topic!

Just a little tip: If you're planning on playing around with differing titles and character lengths, rather than "change, wait for index, google, check, repeat", you could always use something like Photoshop to check:

Take a screenshot of a SERP with a truncated title, add a guide at the trunc point, match the font in Photoshop and type away until you hit the guide.

This way you can play around with a few titles before you go live with any of them.

Hi Bob,

As others have said, there are no hard-and-fast rules. If you want to use a particular style for link text my only other recommendations to the others so far is:

1. Be consistent - don't have all sorts of random colours / styles in your copy.

2. Test. Test. Test. - Give your design to someone and ask them to complete a task that might have them click on a link and see if it works.

Good luck.

If by "How do you maintain the rankings of site A" you mean "what value am I passing over to site B once site A is gone", remember that Site A probably got its ranking through its link portfolio and that isn't going to go away immediately. The purpose of the 301 is to direct crawlers and humans to the content that has superseded the content that was originally linked to.

In addition to the 2 great answers form Dan and Matt, I would say: TEST!

But also: Define your objectives.

Then TEST some more.

Take a look at who is reading your blog now, segment them into demographics that make sense to what you're trying to achieve: are they social? What geographical location are they in? What languages do they speak? What other blogs do they read? Are they repeat readers? Are they a frequent commenter? Do they subscribe to your newsletter? Are they customers? etc.

Does any of this data match up to what you are trying to get out of blogging?

If so, great, carry on doing what you're doing and keep testing.

If not, figure out some strategy to bridge the gap, which may or may not include when you publish the articles.

Hi Nikki,

Some web servers are case sensitive (ours is) and it can cause problems with "duplicate" pages and even 404 errors for capitalised urls.

The first thing you should do is talk to the people responsible for managing that server and see what they can do to normalise the file structure of your website.

Be careful though that links to any capitalised version still pass through.

Yeah, sorry, bit of a basic response! Well, if the server admin took any sort of standard security class then you won't be able to see the file.

You could try this method if it hasn't been secured though:

http://andywolf.com/list-all-dns-records-from-a-public-domain-with-nslookup/