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The answer would be - neither. It's not quite correct to describe something as being preferable to Google in this instance (because ultimately Google want everyone to put all their videos on YouTube then embed them everywhere so they can make loads of money in ad revenue), but in terms of SEO for an eCommerce site, and assuming your videos are to some extend product focused pieces - you should avoid YouTube altogether, because it can cannibalise your rankings, while giving you very little benefit in terms of seeding on YouTube.com (people don't go to YouTube to find products to buy...) I've written about this extensively here: http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy and here http://moz.com/blog/the-marketing-value-of-youtube So, your best bet is using a third party paid hosting platform, e.g. Wistia, Vzaar etc... where you can retain full control of the videos and use them to drive traffic to your site and generate leads/sales. In terms of implementation, It probably won't matter a great deal, as long as your videos are visible to Googlebot on pageload and not delivered dynamically with JavaScript etc.. All you need to do then to get the rich snippet is submit a video sitemap.

So, there's nothing algorithmic that would "flag" or penalise your channel as such and it wouldn't necessarily be "bad" for SEO as such, but I'm confused on a couple of fronts. Firstly, how you would include other's videos on your YouTube channel? Do you mean to just make playlists with other interesting videos included (this is totally fine), or are you actively going to upload other peoples videos? If so, would you have permission to use them? Secondly, why would you want to do this? Bear in mind that YouTube is generally a really really bad channel for anything sales focused or promotional. If you're trying to drive traffic and sales, you're almost certainly better off self hosting your videos rather than putting them on YouTube (more details here and here) and unless you're trying to get tons and tons of subscribers (not really a relevant strategt for an Ecommerce site) then there's nothing wrong with having a leaner channel that just has a few videos on it. In short - What use case is going to benefit you by having users watch other people's videos on YouTube?

In general, I would link out to websites as needed and as your users might find valuable, rather than trying to link out for SEO benefit. The method of creating a links resource as EGOL suggests above can be valuable, but if you're going that route you should make really, really, really sure that you're creating something of value (and something that will be updated regularly), and not linking out to every site that asks or that will link back to you in exchange. In general as far as linking to other websites goes, I would just do it where you otherwise would anyway and don't worry about/try to get any SEO benefit from it.

Adding on to what Peter said, a press release is not a news story, it's a statement about a newsworthy item. The purpose of a press release is to grab the attention of journalists/bloggers so that they will want to to contact you (the press contact) for the information they need to craft their own news and feature stories. A press release should be concise and scannable. Leave out the details. They will get those after contacting you. While I agree with EGOL that distributing content authored by Christie Christie on bridge traffic would definitely garner a ton of attention, I would consider that an article meant for syndication if widely distributed to publishers --- not a press release.  Including a direct quote from Chris Christie would be one way to grab attention with the press release, as would mentioning an opportunity to interview Chris Christie in a press conference, for instance. And yes, press releases are often released solely to let journalists know about press conferences and other PR events. I hope that helps!

Tools like Xenu Link Sleuth and Screaming Frog are also good for looking at your outgoing links, checking their status codes, etc.

You don't need to include them no, and You can't include a sitemap entry for a YouTube video page anyway, only individual pages on your own site. You can choose to include embedded your YouTube videos in your video sitemap if you wish - (Tutorial for you here: https://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/) But this isn't the best strategy to take if you're trying to get rich snippets (see here: http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy) I hope that's useful!

Hi, There is an explanation of the metrics in the Open Site Explorer here: http://moz.com/help/guides/research-tools/open-site-explorer The "number of domains linking to domain" is the total number of other domains that have at least one link to the site. You said, " I'm analyzing our competitors link profile and noticed some numbers as high as 2369232? Yes, 2,369,232 is a high number, but is that number linking domains or some other metric like linking pages? If it is linking domains then you could only expect those sort of numbers for a very large and significant site. If it isn't a site like that then that number must be an error in the report. Peter

You're most welcome!

I completely agree with you. Our goal is to become a reputable source of information within our industry. We recently created a blog that links to our website and Facebook; hopefully over time we'll get some worth-wild traffic. We have a lot of work to do on our site in regards to content, but we're confident we're on the right track. 4wheelonline.com : site blog.4wheelonline.com : Blog Thank you.

Are you looking to offer an affiliate program for your products, or to join other affiliate programs to sell products from other companies and get paid a commission? I have provided an answer for either situation... Having an affiliate program for your products (i.e. becoming a merchant) should not hurt your rankings. There are many options to get started, including open-source, custom-built and affiliate network programs like Commission Junction, Share-a-Sale and Linkshare. Joining affiliate programs as an affiliate shouldn't harm rankings in and of itself, but this all depends on what you do, as Jason described below.

Yep, definitely looks like a case of keyword stuffing.  You'll need to go back to the drawing board and rewrite the content for that page (at least). I'd suggest using the On Page Optimisation tool here.  I just ran it for you and it graded it an A but there are a lot of areas that still need fixing, primarily keyword stuffing related and also it looks like you might have too many onpage links. Do all the suggestions there first and then resubmit the page and see if that helps.  I haven't looked at your link profile - have you had any warnings in WMT?

No. Google will not index your page differently; however, it can potentially slow your pages down, because you will have additional code. Here is what Google has to say on the matter, "Where possible, use absolute rather than relative links. (For instance, when linking to another page in your site, link to www.example.com/mypage.html rather than simply mypage.html)." There are a few reasons behind this thought process: 1) crawlers cannot get confused when crawling your pages, because the complete path is available 2) should your site content be scrapped, the links would point back to your own page 3) if you have poor site structure, this can increase errors (for instance if you switch to HTTPS for a signin page and you continue to use relative pathing for navigation, you could then have links to the HTTPS version of your website and the HTTP version). Also, just for reference, when you are looking at using relative or absolute for canonical pages, Google states, "rel="canonical" can be used with relative or absolute links, but we recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties." Hope this answers your question. Mike

Google only index and crawl hyperlinks. In this case, the url http://www.petst­reetmall.com/pet­safe/, will be indexed, not because of the 3rd paragraph mention, but because of the Visit Website hyperlink in the footer of the ad.

Unlike the title tag, including keywords in your H1 will not improve your rankings in the SERPs any more than placing keyword anywhere high up in the code will. That said, including a keyword in your H1 is great for usability, which can increase conversions. When a user clicks on a search result (which includes keywords in the title tag), it is reassuring to click-through to a page with the same keywords prominently displayed. Marking up your HTML with header tags is also very important for communicating the organization of your page to screen readers, which are used by the vision-impaired to browse the web.

I think it's better to try identifying the bad links and disavow them with google instead of changing pages. Creating new pages might solve the page problem at first, but what if the entire domain gets kicked out down the road? Also, you might have good links pointing to your current pages, creating new replacement pages will make you loose the pagerank you might get from valid sources. I would identify and fix once and for all the issues before it spreads.

I very much hold the same opinion as you. Directories pass very little strength, if they pass any at all. Primarily for the reasons that you have said, but also because they really offer very little to the user (when's the last time someone used a directory to find something?) What I think we've seen lately is Google targeting directories and devaluing the little strength they had relatively quickly and regularly.  This should be reason enough not to pursue them as a tactic. But then you have to consider the negative effect. Directories could very well harm your website.  We've seen directories in the past be deindexed, and links from a deindexed domain can be a negative ranking factor.  There's nothing stopping Google deindexing more directories in the future, in my opinion. I'd move far, far away from directories as a linking tactic and explore other inbound tactics, such as content marketing.  As for bookmarks, I'd pretty much say the same.  I think the chance of it causing a negative effect are smaller, but any benefit a social bookmark has now is likely to be negligible. They're pretty much good for indexing and little else (and even then, sharing the link on facebook or Google+ is better for that). Hope this helps - I think you're spot on and should whip those SEOs into shape!

As it says on the tin: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-clarifies-url-shortenings-impact-on-seo/29312/

Thank you for your help.

As far as "search-engine-spider-stoppers" does this also go for "%" in on-page copy?

Include everything. You want Google to spider everything. Let's take an example: Two pages which talk about Llama Grooming, one which focuses on Llama Fur Enhancement, and the other that focuses on Llama Fur Lustre. The content for both pages really is the same, just the SEO is a little different for each. Your main page: www.llamas.com/lfe.com (Llama Fur Enhancement) has all the copy SEO'd for Llama Fur Enhancement.   Your "alternate" page has the same copy, but optimized for Llama Fur Lustre with a Canonical REL tag back to the original page.  If you omit the second page from the Sitemap, it doesn't get spidered, then what's the point?  Both need to be spidered, but the Canonical REL tag tells it which is the "official" page so you don't get dinged for duplicate content. Capice? Jim