Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Wissam. Always good to hear it from someone else rather than Google.

Definitely! You get the obvious HUGE SEO benefit mentioned previously - AND you are also improving the visitor experience - as they get all of the additional benefits that text gives you i.e the transcription can be read on low bandwidth connections, devices with no video support, downloaded to be read later, printed for reference, translated into other languages. Be sure to give consideration to accessibility to disabled users too! A text transcription allows hearing impaired users to access your content - be mindful of the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act - Comliance with the dda is a legal requirement in the UK, From http://www.disability.gov.uk/dda/smefinal.html What happens if I fail to make reasonable adjustments? You might be breaking the law. A disabled person can make a claim against a provider whose services are impossible or unreasonably difficult for him or her to access.)Additionally you can add links to other relevant pages within your site using the anchor text generated... If your video content is longer than 15 minutes because it is genuinely good content then it is worth transcribing all of it. Don't forget you can omit any parts of the transcription that may not be that engaging.

Makes sense, ty!

You're right, Google doesn't appear to have an opinion on length that is has voiced - more pointing out the quality of the content itself - my statement was more from what I had seen here and there on various publications, and on also as a result of generally having seen pages with more content on performing better organically over time that pages with thinner content (this is not to say that the 500 number was a max at all - far from it, I too have pages 2 or 3 times that size). I would rather the task of optimising performance of 500 word pages than say 250 word pages. Apologies to all for not being a bit clearer with my original answer

I agree with John and Steven. We manage a number of sports blogs, and I have my content writers link back to old posts using new posts.  If there is a legitimate reason to link to the old post then go for it.  For a local music blog, I frequently write content that has no expiration date.  For example, I may post all summer about bands coming to town, or write reviews, but every few posts I might write a “top five music clubs in town” post. Those posts are relevant to my blog, they can be linked back to at a later date, and have the chance of picking up traffic at any time (depending on the search.)  Analytics will also tell you which posts are getting traffic, no matter how old the post may be.  That should give you a clue to what stays relevant.

You mention adding and rewriting content, but are you adding it to existing pages or to new pages. Adding new pages may actually make Panda problems worse, even if they have original content. At some point, you're going to need to reduce your indexed pages (maybe dramatically) and canonicalize the new content to the old, thin content. Just adding content is probably a bad idea. If the crawlers aren't getting into your deeper content, you may have to focus on some deep link-building, either external/inbound or internally by featuring certain pages (and possibly rotating until they get re-cached). You've got to give Google a push to re-crawl and simply adding content to a page they think is low-value probably won't be enough. Injecting solid links at various levels of the site architecture could help. The tough part of this is that the update cycle for Panda-related problems is out of sync with the main index. What might traditionally take days or a couple of weeks to fix could take many weeks with Panda. They seem to be apply a separate data adjustment or possibly a machine-learning algorithm, and it's not part of the main algorithm. So, it's possibly you're on the right track, but simply getting pages re-cached isn't going to automatically reverse a Panda problem.

I've got to agree - use WordPress!

Thanks for your thoughts, Alan.  Much appreciated. I agree that "quality" is the key.

Duplicate content is one of many hundreds of factors.  If you have a very well crafted site, highly optimized, and with a very strong inbound link profile, but only a couple pages (ones that are not highly relevant to your primary topical focus) are duplicate, the potential negative impact on your overall rankings will be minimal. This is true for most SEO factors.  If any single factor has a flaw, but it's not a flaw that applies to the whole site, that single factor is going to have minimum impact on the overall site.

That would make it the TAGFEEC criteria. Or if you add the C, then my favorite would be GETFACE! criteria.

It is a  very small world in a lot of business niches.  Always assume that your boss knows your competitor. Also, unless you are the owner of the company you should never make a threat or send a nasty email to anyone.  Tell your boss about the problem and let him/her do that dirty work.  That's what bosses are for (I am a boss so I can say that with confidence.) Nevertheless... if this person is getting away with using your homepage content he might also be using your product page content, images and who knows what else. I would be on the lookout for other infringements and if I found them I would (in this instance) gently inform my boss about duplicate content problems that might arise and losses in your corporate advantage related to infringement. Be ready to give a very short and very convincing statement about why this is an important issue.  You have seen how they behaved in this situation.  There could be strong relationships between the companies and your company could be on the advantageous side of them. Good luck.  Be careful.

I sometimes tell myself that because I am the official website of the brand, I should have Authority for Google. What do you think?

Thanks everyone for your responses. I can see that it is best to simply use www.blockandcompany.com/blog versus www.blog.blockandcompany.com. In checking again with the company that runs my site, I was told there are problems running a site based on Coldfusion (which my site runs) and Wordpress (with is PHP based). I guess they don't play well in the same environment so that is why they are recommending hosting the blog on a different server and using a subdomain. Looks like I'm stuck doing it this way.