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Many of the big guns like 1800 Flowers, Diapers.com and others all have their sister sites in tabs at the top. Example: http://www.diapers.com/ with their 3 other properties. Since all properties link to one another on every page, it's really a wash, right? No real gain as engines know they are connected and it's the same link multiple times. No real problem either as it's natural for the user experience to have reciprocal links here between the brands. Any additional thoughts here?

Completely custom built, or a 3rd party offering that can be customized? One of the most usable forums I've seen!

In 2012 we will be rolling out a directory of local services for our industry. This will ultimately be thousands of additional pages, with city/zip searching, individual provider pages etc. The main reason is for UX -- providing local resources for our industry to compliment the online experience (we're an online B2C retailer) My question is if there are pros/cons to putting this on a subdomain, or if having it on the root is ideal. I don't see a huge influx of backlinks (making a sub fine) but I suppose that could change down the road. I do see some indexing benefits for new terms like 'service x in los angeles' etc, but that would also be fine on a sub. It feels like it would be cleaner to keep separate and on a sub, but maybe we're missing something. We certainty don't want to hurt anything on our primary site which drives the business. Thoughts?

We're launching a pretty large content program (in the form of a blog) and have a structure issue: Big fans of Wordpress for efficiency reasons, but our platform doesn't allow hosting of a wordpess (or other 3rd party) blog on the primary domain where we want it. site.com/blog Here are the options: 1. Sub-domain: We can easily put it there. Benefit is we use the efficient Wordpress tools and very fast to setup etc. Downside is that the root domain won't get benefit of any backlinks to the blog (as far as I understand). I also don't believe the primary domain will benefit from the daily fresh/unique content the blog offers. 2. Custom Rig: We could create our own manual system of pages on the site to look just like our blog would. This would allow us to have it at site.com/blog and benefit from any backlinks and fresh content. The downside is that it won't be as efficient to manage. 3. External Site:  Create a different site just for the blog. Same issue as the sub-domain I believe. User Experience is a top priority, and all of the above pretty much can accomplish the same UX goal, with #3 requiring a some additional strategy on positioning. Is #1 of #3 going to be a big regret down the road though, and is the backlink/content benefit clearly worth doing #2? (correct me if I'm wrong on my assumptions with #1 but at least with the backlinks I'm almost certain that's the case) Many thanks for your inputs on this.

We have the situation where a group of products fit into 2 different categories and also serve different purposes (to the customer). Essentially, we want to have the same product duplicated on the site, but with unique content and it would even have a slightly different product name. Some specifications would be redundant, but the core content would be different. Any issues?

We're rolling out quite a bit of pro video and hosting on a 3-party platform/player (likely BrightCove) that also allows us to have the URL reside on our domain. Here is a scenario for a particular video asset: A. It's on a product page that the video is relevant for. B. We have an entry on our blog with the video C. We have a separate section of our site "Video Library" that provides a centralized view of all videos. It's there too. D. We eventually give the video to other sites (bloggers, industry educational sites etc) for outreach and link-building. A through C on our domain are all for user experience as every page is very relevant, but are there any duplicate video issues here? We would likely only have the transcript on the product page (though we're open to suggestions). Any related feedback would be appreciated. We want to make this scalable and done properly from the beginning (will be rolling out 1000+ videos in 2010)

We are close to launching a new property and are also in the process of writing completely unique product descriptions for every product. This will continue to take a lot of time. We are debating the following two options: A. Launch soon with about 10-15% of descriptions being very unique and the rest being standard (mostly manufacture supplied). Then continue to update product content as we complete new fresh descriptions. B. Wait to launch until everything is unique. This will probably set us back 2 Months. We of course would like to go live sooner than later, but don't want to jeopardize anything as it pertains to rankings. The fear internally with launching now is that product pages get crawled, but don't make our best 1st impression with the engines. The counter argument is that it doesn't matter much, pages will get crawled again, and the fresh new content will be considered. Any inputs on this? Is '1st impression' with Google key, or is there no harm in launching and updating. Everything else is very sound -- architecture, on-site optimization, usability/crawlability etc. It's just the matter of the unique vs. generic product page content. Many thanks!