I have a site that provides online education and as such, most of the user activity happens behind a login. This has me thinking about potential SEO impacts with a few questions that maybe someone could lend some light on:

1. How important is activity (above just search activity) to the search engines

2. Would it help to enter these pages, even though they're behind a login, into GA as we have with the front-end of the site

3. Does a subdomain make a difference (right now we implement the course as a subdomain of the main site

4. Lastly, as I was looking at compete.com, I am wondering how they get these use statistics?

I certainly agree with your comments on video and youtube in general. My understand, which apparently was incorrect, was that the url in the profile was a dofollow link. Has it always been a nofollow link? Lots of misinformation about this...

Is there still a dofollow link back from a youtube channel to your web site? I filled in the site url in the profile, which in my understanding used to be the single dofollow link back to your web site. However, when I view the page source for the youtube channel it shows up as a nofollow link. Also, in OSE the link does not appear.

Has this changed or am I just not doing this correctly?