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I would use a subfolder instead of a subdomain Instead of having the viewers watch all the videos on one "videos" page, try to split them up into topics and have a article with related videos for each. Create a video sitemap and rank all those pages. Just be careful not to copy/paste the a pre-existing piece of content, otherwise you'll get slapped with duplicate content penalty.

As it's all sorted now, I really wouldn't worry about them too much. You can use the remove URL functionality in WMT, but this is a manual process so I wouldn't do this. If I were in your position, I'd probably just let the pages keep 404ing'. After a bit, Google will usually stop trying to recrawl the 404 pages. Right now they are probably trying to recrawl incase the 404 was an accident. If it's causing a bandwidth problem, you can solve with a robots.txt as suggested earlier.

It seems the general consensus is to launch the "good enough" site without blocking Google, and to fix the SEO issues as soon as possible. However, I'd say that it really all depends on what those SEO issues are. For example, if you think you're going to be releasing thousands of non-canonical URLs into the SERPs without using any "fixes" it could be a long time before you get those out of the index once they're "fixed", especially on a new site with no deep external links. If waiting a couple of weeks before allowing the site to be indexed could save me from having to do thousands of individual redirects (as in those not handled easily by regular expressions), and could keep my site from launching with thousands of pages of thin and near duplicate content (why not start off in Google's good graces? Why start off on the wrong foot?) I would seriously consider blocking everything but the home page in the robots.txt file. You would want the home page to be indexed no matter what because the launch will likely coincide with lots of press, advertising, etc... and people will be searching for your domain and/or brand. This would allow the "domain" to be indexed, which would take care of the date of indexation ranking factor discussed above (though in the grand scheme of things a few weeks is not going to matter), and would allow you to show up for a large proportion of searches (i.e. brand and navigational queries) since you would be unlikely to rank for many big non-brand searches out of the box anyway. Then again, if you are just concerned with some small SEO issues, such as adding alt attributes or improving internal linking, I'd go ahead and launch.

Unfortunately we can't redirect from the shorter to the longer as those we are selling the profile spaces to want to be able to see example.com/profile-name on the browser

Hi Philip! This question is a bit intricate. With AJAX content like this, I know Google's full specifications https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/specification indicate that the #! and ?escaped_fragment= technique works for their crawlers. However, Roger is a bit picky and isn't robust enough yet to use only the sitemap as the reference in this case. Luckily, one of our wonderful users came up with a solution using pushState() method. Click here: http://www.moz.com/blog/create-crawlable-link-friendly-ajax-websites-using-pushstate to find out how to create crawl-able content using pushState. The only other thing I can think of is to run a crawl test if the site is live. You'll have to remove the noindex tag, but updating the robots.txt to allow rogerbot but have a wildcard disallow for the other crawlers should still keep the site from being indexed. Hopefully this will help! Best, Sam Moz Helpster

From a UX perspective, infinite scrolling will only work on certain type of sites (e.g. sites with lots of user-generated content that are short and concise). If users are expecting a never-ending list of info, such as Twitter, Facebook, this will be a good idea. However, for an ecommerce store, infinite scrolling may not be ideal. What the end-users want is to obtain the most appropriate result, rather than a variety of results. Using infinite scrolling in this case will be counter-productive instead. Users may be put off by irrelevant results and may feel difficult controlling their experience on your store, amongst many other reasons. There are reasons why Google has not implemented infinite scrolling for search results yet, and you should take these into account. Here's an article that may be useful to you: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/reach-a-definite-logical-end-using-infinite-scrolling/64008/

Thanks for the responses guys. We were going to just have a unisex version of these pages located on the female sections and have the links on the male part redirect there, but our designer thought this would break the customer process up too much as once on those pages, the only way back to where they were (the male part) would be to click the back bottom on the browser as simply clicking to return home would take them to the home of the female part. I'll make them canonical them - cheers!

What does your audience/customers care about? Is there a way you can survey them? What about looking at reviews that they've left to see if you can figure out what is important to them, what concerns they might have had (that you can address) etc. What about the businesses being listed - what are their goals? What do they want to target? Why so few words? You say you want to be as descriptive as possible by only have 100 words at most?

Thanks Chris - that's some very helpful and clear advice.

As someone who worked as a professional journalist for almost fifteen years, I can attest to what an enormously widespread problem this is. I've heard of cases where individuals have had remarkable success simply by sending a cease and desist order to the offending company. I.e. the scare tactics work. There are some really great suggestions above, too, on how to accomplish this. Hope it works out!

Thanks - I hadn't encountered this before so immediately panicked. Having spent the last several hours doing research I've calmed down a little and will work around as best I can Really appreciate the help!

Thanks for all the help! Hopefully that'll be it sorted now. Cheers!

I think the easiest answer to EGOL is that you would be missing out on a backlink. The whole question here, and thank you to Philip Crothers for asking it, is if this act would be positive or negative from Google's perspective. If Google is saying this is a reciprocal link and all reciprocal links are bad, then I understand. However, if it is truly unique and relevant, would Google be okay with it and could you actually benefit from the backlink? If Google is okay with it, and you will benefit from the backlink, then I think the easy answer is to include the link to your site. Let's look at the example EGOL provided: For attribution you can say... "Philip Crothers is an expert on wedding day hairstyles and is the owner of WeddingDayHair.com" I'm assuming you are saying just use the URL as text, not a link. I understand what you're saying and I think that's a great idea. However, I think there is some value to the user in the form of convenience if in fact they want to visit WeddingDayHair.com, it would be easier to just click the link rather then copy and paste it into your browser. So I do think there is value in the difference. However, what the most ideal solution is will depend on if Google sees this act as a positive or negative one. I would love to hear an accurate answer on this specific situation.

It's all been said but here are a few more tips to get your going with the perfect page titles http://seoandy.com/optimisation/perfect-webpage-title/#sthash.lcH9PSFM.dpbs

Thank you, that's what I've done, so that's great. Brilliant answer, very informative, so thank you.

Thank you so much, you're an absolute star! I know this probably seemed a very obvious question, I just wanted to make sure I had it straight in my head before going down a path.