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I would suggest giving them a snippet of html code to use, that includes your brand name as an anchored backlink. Brand links are quite important these days in my opinion, and I think this may work quite well, especially if you just sent them the snippet of code to use, and they didn't have to do much other than copy/paste. It may be worth varying the anchor text you give to each site owner at least a little bit... so; www.your-domain.com http://www.your-domain.com Your Domain Your Domain - Your Service 'Your Service' - From 'Your Domain' (the the last example, vary the 'Your Service' - using your keywords, but use a different keyword for different sites). If that makes sense?! That's my opinion anyway!

Makes perfect sense.  I run a site with very targetted traffic per state at backcountrysecrets.com.  Doesn't do someone in California much good to know what is available in the outdoors in Idaho if they are looking for something to do this weekend in California. That being said, I still let everyone from California see what is available in Idaho, if they choose to see it.  Who knows, they might be considering a move or visit to Idaho soon.  I really don't think it is worth the worry to hide anything from your customers.  I would worry more about making it easy to find their state.  Perhaps use their IP address to display a prominent link to their state on the page. The other thing to consider is that IP matching is not always correct.  I often get targetted ads for Denver, CO even though it's 8 hours away because of my ISP.

I agree that having a video sitemap is a good idea. I'd also recommend that you take the opportunity now (when just implementing videos, which you'll presumably continue) to implement some HTML5 markup on those videos. Let the search engines know who and what the videos are about, and maximize your benefits.

Hi Shirle, Could you provide more information on the error? I'm assuming that this is appearing when you look at a Crawl Diagnostic Summary? If so, is it an ERROR, WARNING or NOTICE? Clicking down through the error messages and then on an example of the error usually provides you with a short summary of the nature of the problem. i suspect may not be a technical issue i.e. something being 'broken' rather an issue related to the links generated by the trackback... Trackback (taken from Wordpress site) "Trackback helps you to notify another author that you wrote something related to what he had written on his blog, even if you don't have an explicit link to his article. This improves the chances of the other author sitting up and noticing that you gave him credit for something, or that you improved upon something he wrote, or something similar. With pingback and trackback, blogs are interconnected. Think of them as the equivalents of acknowledgements and references at the end of an academic paper, or a chapter in a textbook." Here is another clear summary of what a trackback is: http://www.optiniche.com/blog/117/wordpress-trackback-tutorial/ A trackback isn't bad for SEO if it generates a link to a genuine article on an above board site. However, spammers will try and exploit this to generate additional inbound links to their spammy site and of course you don't want to tarnish your own sites reputation by linking to spammy sites. If someone links to your blog post and you allow a trackback, by publishing it, you are giving a link back to that particular site. Google doesn’t reward excessive link exchanges and may lead to a site being penalised for this practice. You can of course turn off trackbacks in Wordpress if you can't see any benefit to them (or don't need them).

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/12/sending-video-sitemaps-q-holiday-cheer.html good coverage of video sitemaps, would try that if your creating on volume

Also it depends on how good the news content is... if the news is great and interesting stuff it will get lots of links, if it's just company announcements and generic industry news then it probably won't. Same for the videos really... it's not so much what the media for the content is, it's more about what the quality of the content is. i.e. If you have a great news category that puts out original stuff, but are replacing it with videos that aren't as good as your news then that will negatively affect your SEO. Or if you have mediocre news and are replacing it with great video content, that will positively affect your SEO. If both are good, keep both

It is my understanding that canonical tags help prevent duplicate content by telling the crawl bot where the original content exists. Say I want to repost an article from Seomoz on my site that I think my readers would find useful. If I did this without a canonical tag Google would penalize me for posting unoriginal content. To avoid this I would include the original URL back to the Seomoz post in canonical tag to tell Google where I am getting this content. An internal example would be on pages that include URL parameters (pagers for example: www.example.com/product-page and www.example.com/product-page?page1. Here you would want to include a canonical tag to the clean URL). I believe nofollow tags alone don't help with duplicate content issues. You need to also include a noindex tag. Combined, this is an aggressive and effect way to keep duplicate content out of Google's index and avoid penalizations. Hope that helped explain things a little better! Andrew

Yeah I knew they were doing it with books, just wasn't aware about PDFs in general til Keri pointed it out.