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Sure,

Here is a list of some content Moz and Distilled have done on Video.

http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/creating-awesome-videos-for-seo/

http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/youtube-seo/

http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/getting-links-and-seo-value-from-your-youtube-videos/

http://www.seomoz.org/q/best-way-to-host-video

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-stuff-done-by-video

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/video-sitemap-guide-for-vimeo-and-youtube

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472

Only thing i have to add from Vahe's answer Peter is that you probably shouldn't use YouTube for this.

The Hotspot graph metrics for an "advert" style video like you're building will probably be very low, as will the overall views and this will cause Google to see it negatively and not rank it. If you use a service like Vzaar - http://www.vzaar.com or Wistia - http://www.wistia.com then you're probably more likely to get a good blended video result. With Wistia, you can also automatically add content to your sitemap, so i expect this will be a great way to go for you.

Cheers,

Phil

The issue is, this isn't what the map location feature was designed for. If you take this approach, you're ultimately attempting to trick YT into thinking that your content is unique when it isn't and this will not be looked at kindly by Google. While your approach may work for now, the YouTube videos wont rank very well and you are putting yourself highly at risk of a spamming penalty in the future.

I think the single video option with dynamic page could definitely work, but it might be tricky to get the one page to rank 100+ geographical terms

An alternative might be not using YT to host, as Google can see the analytics info for YT and give negative quality metrics based on the fall out rate of the YouTube vids; which will inevitably be extremely high if it's an advert.

I would recommend using Wistia - http://wistia.com/ which Moz use, as they have an automatic sitemap submission service which is very nicely put together and easy to use if you're scaling the content over a vast franchise. You could upload multiple versions of the same video with Wistia and create unique pages for each franchise location and then you should be able to get blended results for multiple geographical terms - especially if you hook the pages with the videos on to the Google Local listings.

All that said, Google will be able to crack down on duplicate video in the future. Audio wave matching isn't that hard - they already do it for YouTube and will do it for other services in the future. If you can get away from totally duplicated videos, especially on the audio front, it would future proof you from Panda and other dupe content smack-downs. Maybe get a different actor (with appropriate regional accents) to do the VO for each franchise?

Hi Richard,

The long and short of it is that yes, this will eventually get picked up as duplicate content and devalued, but moreover, if you upload the same video multiple times, you will be diluting the amount of potential views each version will get and therefore hampering the rankings on YT, Google video and Google organic.

Therefore, I would strongly recommend against uploading duplicate versions with differing meta-elements. What is the ultimate goal of these videos? Are you trying to get blended results to YT through submitting video- site-maps? Or are you trying to rank on YouTube for a variety of long-tail terms?

Either way, duplicate content won't be the way to go. I would either recommend optimising a single video for a host of long tail terms by building lots of strong anchor text links to it and hosting the video on a page on your own site which has a list of relevant phone numbers/addresses in the source but only delivers a single one to a human visitor based on IP?

Or, if you want to make lots of videos - they will all need to be broadly different so there is value in watching the whole series for any given user. The best way to do that is to take a simple concept and then just scale it by having duplicated branded wrapping and differing the internal content, such as with the following example, which I built last week: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDCBEEAFF5571810B&feature=view_all

Those were made entirely within one day, without any expensive software, so it is possible to scale unique videos. If you do something like this, then you could add different phone numbers and addresses in the meta-data and tagging. Your channel actually has lots of good unique content, so I think you'll be best off sticking down this route and just scaling your production further.

Thanks,

Phil

Hi Michelle,

This sounds interesting and I'd love to take a further look at it for you. Could you give me a link to the YT channel you mentioned and also some examples of the videos being embedded on other's sites without your link?

Thanks,

Phil.

Hey Steve,

I agree with Erica - iFrames or RSS are probably the best way to go. If you just build a simple but nice looking embed code which automatically pulls in links to new videos into an accesible list, I think you'll be doing well. Also make sure you include some sort of branded anchor text link to the homepage at the bottom of the embed for each site - Just to maximise on the linking opportunities and overall brand visibility.

Hey Jared,

To an extent, the process of outreaching video is much the same as the process of outreaching infographics, blog posts or other promotional content. There aren't really good places to share videos, just by the virtue of them being videos. The best places to upload your content will very much depend on the style and the target market of the content itself

Would you be able to share the screen capture videos with me? I might then have a better idea for some specific outreach ideas and places to seed the contnet - rather than offering generic points about process.

That said, there are some specific points for the two video hosting platforms you mentioned.

Vimeo:

• I assume this is corporate content which you're putting up on vimeo pro (rather than a standard licence)?
• Use this version for your link building outreach
• Embed the video at 640px by 360px  content on a rich, accesible page on your site with lots of surrounding copy.
• include a sharable embed code below the video which links back to your target page with the anchor text you want.
• Submit an XML video sitemap to GWT with the page your vimeo video is hosted on.
• Build strong internal links to that page

Youtube:

• Put a link as the first thing in the video meta description
• ensure you have uploaded a closed caption file - use http://www.captiontube.appspot.com to easily create one.
• optimise the keyword tags, title and meta description for the keywords you want to rank for.
• link to it from your main website.

Hi Prateek - that's cool about the unique images! - good idea.

I think if you can fix the ads and sort out your design issues, you'll be in a much better place going forward.

Fixing your link profile is going to be a massive challenge. I'll be brutally honest, it's one of the worst ones i've seen in a long time. What you should do is contact the webmasters of all the questionable sites linking to you, asking them kindly to remove the links. If there's any specific pages that a lot of bad sites are linking to - then you should remove them, leaving a 404 error and then transfer the old content on a new URL. Once you have removed as many of the bad links as you can, I would make a list  of them and then send this to Google along with a re-inclusion request. If you've also smartened up your design and removed your ads - they should hopefully let you back in....but no promises i'm afraid.

All the best,

Phil

Hi Prateek,

It's tricky to say definitively why you've lost all your ranking without spending some time with your analytics, but i've had a quick look through your site and link profile and i have a few thoughts - which it would probably be worth looking into further.

1. Your site doesn't have enough unique content on it, which may be causing a panda slap. - while i assume all of the blog articles are unique and written by you (they are on other sites on the web, but i think these sites have duplciated your creations)  the ads, the sparse design and the non-unique images don't indicate to Google that you're a valuable authoritative resource. - i would seek to redesign the site and look lessening the prevalence of the few ads you have,
2. You have an extremely dodgy looking link profile - some of your referring sites seem incomplete and spammy, you have tons of nofollow links from unrelated sources and lot of links from extremely questionable adult sites. I wouldn't be at all surprised if you are getting a penalty for these links or Google have deindexed the sites providing you these links - lessening your domain authority. I would recommend that you seek to clean up your link profile as best you can - especially the adult links.
3. Your site is a quite slow to load. - to fix this, I would initially look at browser caching and the size of your images

Thanks,

Phil

To me, this is a bit like finding a successful infographic and then asking "Isn't image content killer link bait?".

Video, like image, is a medium for content delivery - rather than a type of content and this is how it should be considered in the context of link bait. Video content can be excellent link bait, but the form itself is not by default any more "linkable"  than images, words or applications.

"Linkbait video" it requires a specific approach which often doesn't tie in very well with commercial interests. For someone to link to a video, there has to be specific value in the experience of watching it through -- this can be an aesthetic experience, humour, instruction or exciting delivery of information. for more information and advice on what makes a "linkable" video - check out this blog post on the topic - http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/creating-awesome-videos-for-seo/

There are also some specific problems with using video for Link Bait

1. If you don't secure your video properly, the content can be ripped and uploaded to YouTube. As you rightly pointed out, Youtube is the worlds second biggest search engine, which means that individuals will use it to find your video content, rather than your own site. This means that often a lot of your earned links will go to an erroneous YouTube channel, rather than the targeted domain.
2. Video is invasive when embedded on a website. Unlike reading or looking at an image, watching a video is an active and engaged process. You cannot skim read a video and thus, if someone embeds a video on their site - it has to be because they want their readers to temporarily disengage from their own content and spend the time watching the thing through.
3. People don't link to mediocre videos. The internet is awash with average video content, the vast majority of which is on YouTube and never gets watched or linked to be anyone. While you can always pick-up a few links with an average blog post, PDF document, infographic or plugin, run of the mill video will get you nowhere.

So, yes, Video can be great link bait - but there's a lot of risks involved and you have to do an exceptional job really get the links coming in. I would encourage you to have a play and put something out there, but don't expect to get it right first time. Videos can be valuable even if they don't get links as they offer the opportunity for blended organic results, video results, exposure on YT and can help improve the overall richness and quality of your site.