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If you have WordPress then there's a plugin that will do all of this for you in a couple of seconds. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/xml-sitemaps-for-videos/
You're really missing out if you're not on WordPress :s If you haven't got too many videos then manual building of a video sitemap isn't tough at all. Take a look at the source code for this video sitemap if you just want to copy and paste the structure: http://www.smemarketing.com/sitemap-video.xml
That would definitely be news to me. I have a bunch of EMDs that rank well and I've built links using the same anchor text. If your website name and therefore your brand name is "Personalised Birthday Gifts" then you can bet you'll get natural links with that in the anchor text.
There's no negative effect to using exact match anchors for exact match domains. Only positive.
Use the anchor text "personalized birthday gifts" ... I've never heard or seen anything about commercial keywords damaging rankings. Do not stay away from using 'commercial keywords' as anchor text - this would be a disaster. When you say heavily, I guess you mean having all of your links with the same anchor text; while heavy usage of anchor text clearly correlates with good rankings, it's risky business (it's not particularly natural looking).
There is a trade-off between branding and EMDs. If you use an EMD then you have huge SEO benefits (at least for now) but with branding you'll have a memorable name that people become loyal to.
Yep, if you add a robots.txt it won't redirect. But I would look to remove the 404 redirect as well. It also looks to me like a meta refresh as well which has potential SEO problems. I would much prefer a 301 if they are really keen to redirect 404s.
The main reason for not redirecting 404s is that it stops you from seeing broken links on your website. Imagine you have a discreet link to a services page that is broken - you wouldn't be able to pick it up with link checkers like Xenu and it could go unnoticed for months if not years. Might be worth suggesting to them that they remove it.
I would be surprised if they purposefully redirected it. Have you been able to take a look at what's in the .htaccess file? If you copy and paste what's in there I might be able to see what's going on with it.
Also, if it is being redirected then it won't get crawled and so it won't have any effect. That could be good or bad depending on what you had written in the .txt file.
EDIT:
Just had a quick look at the site. It seems to 404 straight away and then redirect. Therefore I imagine the robots.txt file doesn't exist and they have it set up to redirect 404ing pages to the homepage. Something that I would advise against (it's useful to know what's 404ing).
This sounds like a great idea. I'm certainly interested in seeing how you handle the Xenu data if you're willing to share!
I think that's a great idea! Having a custom 404 for deleted employees would be great for branding purposes and general web 2.0 friendliness - I'm sure SEOmoz would agree.
However from a strictly SEO point of view, removing the content and replacing it with 404esque material wouldn't help. However my comment(s) is pretty much a moot point given that there is almost certainly no SEO value on this page anyway. But I guess I'm just a principles kind of guy.
Hey Brent,
Bing and Google won't see a 404 if you redirect. There also wouldn't be an issue with duplicate content - what exactly are you referring to here?
Speaking of 404s... your avatar is doing one.
There's always a way. Perhaps I would unlink it from the employee bios and whack on a noindex,follow meta tag to ensure it still passes rank if it was being linked to. This way users would never find it.
But more often than not I would just 301 unless for some reason there was a bunch of PageRank that would get lost in a redirect to an irrelevant(ish) page.
It sounds like it's just a simple case of deletion? In this case, set up a 301 redirect so that it points to the employee bios 'home' page. That way any links that were pointing to the removed page will have their 'juice' moved to a page that does exist. Although with the content not being the same, the amount of PageRank passed is dubious but still worth doing.
If you do a 301 then you wouldn't have to worry about updating HTML sitemaps. But Bing does openly admit that they hate untidy XML sitemaps (i.e. URLs that include 301s, 302s, 404s etc) so I would clean that up - and probably do the same for Google too while I'm at it.
Personally, as an SEO (with varying degrees of tunnel vision) I wouldn't want to ever delete content.
Google wants the user to have the best possible experience when reading content, watching videos or looking at images. Think about the following variables:
There's more. You just need to think of what's best for the user and run with it. You can experiment as much as you like! I know far more about image ranking than video ranking but if you need any more details feel free to PM me.
Great idea Donnie. This comment may well have changed our initial SEO strategy. I'm guessing you've got experience in this area - can I be nosey and ask what your testing process is?
Many thanks!