Video & Image Spam?

[Choice]

We have 50 product videos and 100 product images to distribute. For the sake of increasing nofollow Linking Root Domains, my manager wants to distribute them in the following manner:

• 10 Company profiles on 10 video sites, each with 5 videos.  The sites to be used are sites like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, etc.
• 10 Company profiles on 10 image sites, each with 10 images.  The sites to be used are sites like Photobucket, Flickr, imageshack, Imgur, etc.

My thoughts are that we should stick to one service for video (YouTube) and one service for images (Flickr).  We can increase nofollow LRD's by doing some quality blog commenting.

Keep in mind that the product images look great, but the videos are amateur and consist of someone holding the product and discussing it's features. Each vid is around one minute in length.

What do you think of the two approaches and which do you prefer?  Do you think creating many profiles will come off too spammy?  We are also weathering a Panda penalty and submitting a Reinclusion Request to Google within the next two weeks.  Your thoughts are very welcomed and appreciated.  Thanks

[NakulGoyal]

Considering the penalty issues and whether the rest of your link profile is natural or not, I actually recommend sticking with what you are thinking, 1 for YouTube and 1 for Flickr rather then distributing it onto multiple sites for now.

[Choice]

Hey, thanks for the reply Nakul

The current link profile is anything but natural and is the main cause of our penalty woes.  We are now in the painstaking process of removing as many as possible.

What is the reasoning behind your opinion?  Do you think that using multiple sites can possibly hinder our RR?  Or, will a larger profile on one property be the most beneficial option?

[PhilNottingham]

Hey,

So - I actually don't think either of those two strategies are worth considering in order to get more nofollow links. Particularly with YouTube - if you connect your site (by linking) to a video that will inevitably perform poorly on YouTube/vimeo etc - you're just sending negative branding signals about your site back to Google and it wont help you in anyway.

So - my first questions should be - why do you need more nofollow links? A very small percentages (think it's 3% or something) of the webs links are actually nofollow,- and these are typically accrued naturally through profiles, comments, wikipedia articles etc. The only reason i can think of why you might want to be increasing them at a small scale like this would be to cover up a thin and questionable backlink profile. If this is the case, then i don't think this strategy will help to mask the unnatural links/suggest improved quality - especially if you've already been slapped by Panda. Multiple profiles will look spammy and i can't see them helping you in any tangible way.

Probably a better use for your Product videos will be on the site - hosted on a secure third party platform (not YouTube), to show Google that you're expanding your media types and creating richer content. Coming out of a Panda penalty - this seems like a much better thing to be doing and will send the right signals. Additionally - i would use the great images on your site, rather than using other services to post your content for the sake of nofollow links.

Like you suggest, you can increase nofollows from quality comments and profiles generally - but i come back to the question of the underlying purpose here.

So - My suggestion is: Put all the content on your own site only- and securely host the videos with a third party solution (vimeo pro, wistia etc) rather than using YouTube. You don't need to give away content to get nofollow links - but if you're trying to make a bad backlink profile look good - that isn't the way to do it.

Hope that's useful!

Phil