Please, help me to understand these Google results
-
Hello here,
I am eager to know your thoughts on this.
If I search on Google for "fur elise violin sheet music", we are on the second page for our sheet music title of "Fur Elise for violin and piano" (look for "virtualsheetmusic.com"). Ok, that's not very good and I still have an hard time to figure out why there are many crappy and NOT really related websites listed before us, but here is the best (weird) part...
.... search now for "fur elise violin and piano sheet music" which should narrow the query further down and so increase the chances for us to get on the first page results... and in fact we are on the first page with that query, but for a different page and a different music for a different instrument! If you scroll the first page of the results, you will find our site at the end of the 1st page for our version of "Fur Elise" for "viola and piano" and not for "violin and piano"... What the heck!??! Why's that??? Doesn't make any sense too me... why if the user search for "fur elise violin and piano" Google shows "Fur Elise for viola and piano"???!!
I would really appreciate any thoughts on all this.
Thank you in advance!
-
Thank you Peter,
yes, we are aware of that and are working in some way to consolidate multiple versions of the same piece of music via canonical tags. I also think that's the only way to go for us.
Thank you again for your insights!
-
Hmmm... I'm seeing the same page for both searches and you rank higher (about #5) for the longer-tail search (#10 for me on the broader search).
Unfortunately, the violin/viola pages are very similar, content-wise, and might appear thin. I realize that they're legitimate products, but you may be diluting your ranking ability by indexing every variation in this way. You've got 39 arrangements of Für Elise indexed on Google - while they're all unique products, when you multiple that against all of your products and then start to consider search pages, etc., odds are that you may just be trying to rank too many pages.
There's no easy answer here. You could build more authority, of course, or you could consider consolidating somehow - possibly trying to rank one parent page for each score and then let people select the variations/instruments from that parent page (most likely with canonical tags). There's always a trade-off, but right now you're spreading your ranking ability across a lot of similar pages.
-
Hi Miki and thank you for your answer.
Well, I use Firefox private browsing window to see "unbiased" Google results (am I doing it right?), and I cannot see the violin result you mentioned as #7. I see just the "viola" page at #5 (excluding the videos results of course).
I understand that the violin page lacks the Scorch files (that I am going to add in a minute, and I thank you for letting me know about that!), but why Google would prefer to show the user the version for viola if he/she (the user) is actually looking for the "violin" version? Doesn't make any sense to me... does to you?
-
Thank you Jesse, you made a good point here about the video, and I will look into hosting our own videos on our own domain as you are suggesting.
Alexa gives you the overall load times of a website, and I am asking myself how accurate that may be... but even by looking at that, just the first returned results are faster than my whole site, so I don't see that as an important factor to outrank my pages on the Google results. For me, most of those websites are just crap (they may have some better metrics than mine, but most of those results look a long way from what Google consider "high quality" and "trustworthy" websites).
But back to my main question here, I still can't understand why Google is putting our "viola" page when users are searching for the violin version of the music mentioned above, and that's what I am trying to understand.
Thank you again!
-
So I was using Alexa's rankings to determine your site speed. It isn't a HUGE difference, but is worth noting. Consider looking into a service like CloudFlare to serve localized caches based on IP address of the requester... (cloudflare.com)
As for the videos - When you embed a YouTube video into your site, the video is still on YouTube. Therefore, if anybody links to it or shares it the backlink goes to YouTube. (unless they happen to share your exact URL which would be silly because there's a "share" button built right into your video.)
Also, the YouTube page where the original video sits will eventually be ranked and it could end up beating you out of placement much like the example I provided did for you earlier. If this existed say on your own site under a blog or video blog or just video section, then at least your own domain is popping up instead of dailymotion or youtube.
Bottom line is the video being hosted on your own website is a far superior option when it comes to SEO. You want that traffic hitting YOUR server and the backlinks pointing to YOUR domain. Not YouTube's. *(not to mention, ad-free)
Now YouTube can still be a part of a successful SEM campaign.. but I wouldn't put my bread and butter videos on there.
-
Jesse, thank you for your responses and for suggesting Wistia... but I don't understand one thing: YouTube also allow embedding right? What's the difference then?
Also, we actually are embedding our own videos inside our product pages... look at the above mentioned Fur Elise for violin and piano, our own video is also embedded as a YouTube video at the product-page level here below:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/EliseVl.html?tab=video
I am afraid to miss something here...
Also, about your mentioned "the pages outranking you (beyond the youtube vids) all load faster than yours", I don't understand how you can see that... I have searched for "fur elise violin sheet music", and all the sites before me are slower with the only exception of one which is fast like mine. I have tested them with the following tool:
http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Ideas??!!
-
Because Wistia allows you to embed on your own site. Thus, if you have an awesome video that people are watching/linking to/travelling to/sharing on social etc, Google will pick it up and your site's ranking will improve. Not to mention if that video gets ranked on dailymotion.com, it's driving traffic to somebody else's website instead of yours.
Sure you can have a link to your site, but you're losing traffic by adding that extra hurdle. You might get a 20% CTR there if you're lucky.. At that point it seems silly to allow some other domain to reap the rewards of your awesome popular video.
Also if somebody wants to embed the video, they can do so and it's a backlink you just gained (via wistia of course)
That's the quick version (sorry busy monday)
-
can you expound a bit why wistia vs youtube (being the #2 search engine?)
-
Oh excuse me, it seems you do have a video displaying on that first page of results. Which technically gives you three of the 10 results on that SERP. WHOA!
This would be even better if the video was hosted on your domain, in your blog. Seriously consider moving it there.
(this is the link I'm referencing: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x10zfwm_ludwig-van-beethoven-s-fur-elise-sheet-music-for-violin-and-piano-sheet-music-video-score_music)
-
I came here to say exactly this. You're absolutely lucky to have 2 spots on page 1 for the same keyword.
Also I'd like to point out that the pages outranking you (beyond the youtube vids) all load faster than yours. Just an observation. Speed is a factor.
Also, why don't you get some video content in there? Those seem to be ranking well. (HINT: Use a video hosting platform like wistia.. skip youtube)
-
First of all, when I search for "fur elise violin and piano sheet music" your pages come up TWICE on page one - results number 6, and 7.
The Viola page comes in at #6, and the Violin at #7.
I would rather have two results rather than one - so consider yourself lucky. (I'm not sure if this is coming up like this on your SERP page, but regardless - your results are personalized for you - I would check www.startpage.com - and I'll bet you see the "real" results (#7 & #8)
One thing that stands out to me about your Viola page which may be why it is beating you Volin page:
It includes "Scorch" files, which the other page does not
Hope this helps
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Help with 404 pages
Hello everyone, A few days back, we have permanently removed 3 main categories from our E-commerce website and because of that our more than 50k URLs are showing 404 error (according to Google Search Console). What are the good practices to handle such extensively 404 pages? Please help!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
How to take out international URL from google US index/hreflang help
Hi Moz Community, Weird/confusing question so I'll try my best. The company I work for also has an Australian retail website. When you do a site:ourbrand.com search the second result that pops up is au.brand.com, which redirects to the actual brand.com.au website. The Australian site owner removed this redirect per my bosses request and now it leads to a an unavailable webpage. I'm confused as to best approach, is there a way to noindex the au.brand.com URL from US based searches? My only problem is that the au.brand.com URL is ranking higher than all of the actual US based sub-cat pages when using a site search. Is this an appropriate place for an hreflang tag? Let me know how I can help clarify the issue. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby
-Reed0 -
Google penalty or what???
Hi, we have a blog site xxxxxxxxxxx.es, that yesterday dissapear from google ranks all of a sudden it only appears if you write xxxxxxxxx.es I have checked gogle webmaster tools and there are no manual actions, no messages. Also, we don't have much links pointing to this site. Webmaster tools show only 319 links. We don't understand what have happenned. Never see something similar. What do you think? Any help would be appreciated. How do you proceed in this cases? It doesn't seem to be a link problem. How do you know what kind of penalty do you have? Thank you. Update: Hi, the domain is www.crearcorreoelectronico.es I have check the majestic seo, ose, and wmt and get the links. We have some links that are not good, but are automatic ones, that some portals generate. Maybe is something related with the content. I don't know Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite1 -
Buying a domain banned by google
Hi , I came across a super domain for my business but found out that it was a great domain with 100s of link backs but is now banned by Google search engine meaning Google does not index content from that domain. Since the domains linkbacks are from my domin does it make sense to but that domain and redirect those link backs to another (301) and hope that the new domain gets some juice ... I know it is sounding crazy and may not be the best thing to do ethically but still wanted to check if its possible to get some juice.. Rgds Avinash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Avinashmb0 -
Help needed for a domain
I have a small translation agency in Brazil (this website), totally dependent on SEM. We are in business since 2007, and we were on top position for many relevant keywords until the middle of 2011, when the ranking for the most important keywords started dropping. In that time, we believed that we needed to redesign the old static website and replace it by a new modern one, with fresh content and with weekly updates, which we did, and it's now hosted on Squarespace. I took care to keep the old links working with 301 redirections. When we made the transfer from the static site to Squarespace (Mar/2012, see the attachment), the ranking dropping became even more serious. Today, we have less than 50 unique visitors per day, in a total desperate situation! To make things worse, we received an alert from Google on 23/September/2012 talking about unnatural inbound links, but Google said that "As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole", so we thought we didn't need to worry about. Google was correct, I worked many hours to register our website in web directories, I thought there would be no problem since I was doing this manually. My conclusions are: Something happened prior to Mar/2012 that was making us losing territory. I just don't know what! The migration to Squarespace was a huge mistake. I lost control over the html, and squarespace doesn't do a good job optimizing the pages for SEO. We also were also blasted by Penguin on September, but I believe this is not the main cause of the drop. We were already running very badly at this time. My actions are: a) I generated a DTOX report and I'm trying to clean up the links marked as toxic. That's a hard work! After that I will submit a reconsideration request. b) I'm working on the site: Improving internal link building for relevant keywords Recently I removed a "tag cloud" which I believe was hurting my SEO. Also, I did some redirections that were missing. c) I trying to generate new content to improve link building to my site. d) I'm also considering to stop putting all my coins on this domain, and maybe start a fresh new one. Yes, I'm desperate! 🙂 I would appreciate a lot to hear from you guys, expert people! Thanks a lot, MWcEdPa.png?1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rodrigofreitas0 -
Can links indexed by google "link:" be bad? or this is like a good example by google
Can links indexed by google "link:" be bad? Or this is like a good example shown by google. We are cleaning our links from Penguin and dont know what to do with these ones. Some of them does not look quality.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bele0 -
Google Experiment
Hi there, are there any implications for organic seo for implementing google experiment. Where you send users to a new page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Google Translate for Unique Content
We are considering using the Google Translation tool to translate customer reviews into various languages for publication as indexable content both for users and for search engine long tail visibility and rankings. Does anyone have any experience, insights or caveats to share?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edreamsbcn0