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I agree! I really like reading transcripts rather than watching videos, so thinking about the user rather than the search engine, I would suggest putting the transcript in a collapsed div.

Useful content, amusing copy, appealing design, intuitive navigation, easily crawled HTML ...

What I mean when I ask "Are you sure you have the right keywords?" is "Do you know what words people type in when they are seeking the information you offer?" You may suspect that people type in one thing when they really type in something completely different.

In my experience, no. We purchased another company in our niche and have maintained the website that came with the company. The product lines overlap almost completely, and both sites rank very well. We write unique content for each site and change the names of overlapping product lines. We're not taking any pains to be sneaky -- our corporate address appears on both sites, there's some interlinking, and they're on the same C-block. If Google wants to punish companies that do this, they haven't bothered creating an algorithm for it. I'm not sure they'd want to punish this, however.

I noticed this issue, too, and asked the SEOmoz helpdesk what was going on. They said that on their tool, the threshold for duplicate content is 95% of the HTML. So if you have a lot of HTML that isn't actually your meaty content, the pages may be flagged as duplicate even if you have a couple hundred words of unique meaty content.

Google seems to be smarter about duplicate content on your own site. My guess is that it's checking the HTML other than the navigation and such. It might even be stripping the markup and just looking at words that are in headings and paragraphs. So it would only consider it a duplicate if the meaty content was extremely or exactly similar to other meaty content on your site.

Unfortunately, I had to do quite a bit of filtering to find the "true duplicate" content on my site -- pages that actually had the same meaty content, because someone threw in some boilerplate copy long ago to multiple category pages.

As another data point, we are still including 2-3 keywords in title tags and have not suffered for it yet. We often do something like

KW1, KW2 & KW3 | Brand

or

KW1 - KW2 | Brand

depending on whether the keywords are very close variations or somewhat dissimilar terms.

Well, first of all, if you control all those links, they're probably not "quality." Second, collective wisdom suggests that post-Penguin, you need to keep KW anchor text below 50%. So if you're building 300 links, they can't all have "example tools" as the anchor text.

I just learned about vlookup this year. Super useful for cross-referencing spreadsheets.

Here's how it works. In the same Excel document, you will have two sheets. The first one will have all the data from your last OSE report, the one with 50K links. (I'm assuming you exported this.) The second sheet will have all the data from your more recent OSE report, the one with 30k links. The vlookup function will quickly check if something on the first sheet is also on the second sheet.

If it's on the first sheet but not on the second sheet, then that's one of the links that "disappeared." Look those over, check for patterns, test some of them. Maybe you had a sitewide link on a giant website, and that website just went down. But if the missing links are still online, then OSE simply didn't crawl them this time.

If you've never used vlookup before, it's worth spending a few hours reading tutorials, watching videos (tons on YouTube!), and learning the syntax. Best of luck!

Yes, I would add a company description to those pages, and make sure there is some text that explains that you do not currently carry that manufacturer's products.

Are these blogs actually intended to provide useful, interesting, amusing content to web surfers? Or do they exist purely to pass pagerank?

If it's the former, I have a hard time believing that readers will trust the information if it looks spammy (and 3-5 exact match KW links per post looks spammy). So the strategy probably wouldn't work for that reason.

If it's the latter, it's trivially easy for Google to figure out that you're running an incestuous little blog network to move pagerank around. That's not the sort of thing they want to reward. Meaning they've already figured out how to devalue those links, or they will soon. So the strategy either isn't working now or will stop working soon.

In either case, your questions are about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Can't believe I didn't think of this earlier, but are you comparing the numbers you're getting here to the numbers you're getting from Google Webmaster Tools? Did you also see a drop in backlinks there?

Zappos.com has amazing on-site product videos, and their YouTube channel ain't too shabby, either.: http://www.youtube.com/user/zappos

This is definitely not 'great linkbuilding." It's spammy linkbuilding. Now, as the other commenters noted, spammy linkbuilding still works to some extent. The question is, how much is it working? Will it work at all by the end of the year? Given its limited benefit and the high likelihood that it will soon have no benefit whatsoever, is this the best use of your client's resources?

I'm a new in-house SEO at a company that has been doing something similar for years. It's still working, so we haven't stopped it yet. But I'm working on transitioning to the content-marketing model, so we'll survive the inevitable Penguin update that tanks it all. So educate your client about how outdated and spammy that kind of linkbuilding is, and make sure they understand that it's just a matter of time before it stops working. If they want to keep doing it for now, that's their choice. But they cannot afford to only do it. They also need to start a solid content-marketing plan ... and if they don't think they can execute a solid content-marketing plan, they need to think about shifting resources to other inbound marketing tactics like PPC.

That's exactly the model I was thinking of. The mouseover effect is a bit gaudy for my taste ...

I'm not sure what you mean when you say "My most recent report, this week, gave us a PR 8 for this keyword." Are you saying the ranking report put you in position #8, but you see yourself in position #11?

I think you are being blinded by your bias, yes.

If you, the web designer, insert a link to your site into the footer of all the sites you design, that is not an editorial link. It's not a link that the site owner created of their own volition because they think it's valuable content. In fact, if a company is hiring an outside web designer, they might have no idea how to remove the link from their footer. They might not even notice it.

The search engines know all this, and it's why they don't like footer links. They are well aware that web designers, Wordpress theme developers, and so on have been using this technique for years.