Did adding product videos cause my products to lose #1 position?
-
I work on an e-commerce site and for many of the products we sell, we rank #1 for "product name + item number" related searches.
We decided to add product videos to some of our products in the hopes of getting an additional listing in the SERP's (regular listing + video listing in universal video results)
Instead..
What we've noticed is that sometimes we are not getting 2 listings but just a regular listing with a video thumbnail that ranks somewhere on the middle of the first page.
The video thumbnail is great.. but I'd rather the #1 position. I don't think Google likes to show video results as the #1 position for obvious product searches.
What do you think?
Did we lose our #1 position because of adding the videos to our product pages?
Any advice or similar experiences?
~~
Additional information: On some of those queries, Google had decided to ignore our video and we have maintained our #1 ranking.
Thanks!
-
This same thing is happening to me right now. I have two projects: One in English and one in German and they are getting totally different results.
I have pretty much tried with everything: wistia, vimeo and dailymotion I got all of the videos on my sitemap BUT they were indexed in different times: first two of them and then the last one. I have noticed that sometimes Google shows the video snippets and sometimes its ignored.
The rankings for those keywords are being also very unestable. I tried also to put flash videos on my German language project and they also got indexed because I put them on my video sitemap but now in this precise moment I was testing if putting a video for a page that was on first position could get a higher CTR with the video snippet but guess what... currently my #1 ranking position is now out of the 100 positions. CHAOS!
I guess at this moment Google is trying to figure out whether to show up or not a video snippet and our page for a keyword in a language where there were never a video snippet. SO Confusing! Also found out that your rankings definitely drop when they were at the top 3 positions even they can drop to the second or third page but at this moment they are trying to get their past position. I will have to keep a big eye on this.
If you guys got more insight and ideas for me to get my video snippets with more stability let me know!
P.S in case you want to check my keyword and URL that was #1 and dropped out of the 100 results its the German word "Peru Reisen" my page is http://www.viventura.de/reisen/peru
Thanks
-
I understand your concern, and the same thing has happened to us. But, the real question is, how has your traffic for those search terms been affected? Are you getting less traffic now that you have a video snippet show up in the third result as opposed to the plain text 1st result?
We've actually received higher CTRs with our snippet results. As long as the snippet is generally above the fold. You need to weigh the actual affect of the snippet on your traffic and not just the vanity of a ranking position.
-
Thanks Charlie,
Regarding the hosting, i was actually responding to Julie Heltunen who expressed concern that this may be a factor.
I think the click through rate is actually the integral issue here. The goal of SEO is improving traffic through organic search. If third place with a video snippet in a SERP is giving you more referring traffic than a first place ranking previously was - then despite being third place, your new result is better "optimised" than your previous situation. There would be no point being first place, if everybody is clicking on result three. Especially with the increase in personalised search, we need to stop thinking that "higher up = better" and really start drilling down into the data to see what is working for us. If you've been pushed down to three, but it's working for you - then third place is where it's at.
-
Thanks for the reply, Phil.
I'm not testing whether my choice of hosting effects rankings.
I'm trying to confirm that by adding a video to our product pages, we may have been pushed down lower in the SERP's to fit Google's "aesthetic model."
Whether or not that results in more or less clicks is a separate issue... but definitely the next step.
-
I have tested this extensively and can confirm that your choice of hosting for the video has no bearing at all on the ranking. Videos are indexed as components of a pagetype, agnostic of the provider. Video results are often given specific places, often third, and a first place result indexed with a video may drop places to fit the aesthetic model.
Google are continually shifting this, so the results will likely fluctuate - with and without rich snippets for a variety of terms.
Extensive testing also indicates that a video result in third typically gets more clicks that first place. Meaning a video result in third is ultimately than a first place result. While your ranking may drop, your traffic will rise. That's not necessarily going to be true across the board, but is a general trend.
YouTube is a poor choice for product videos, as you can't secure them and they will normally perform very poorly in Google organic and YouTube search. YouTube is however, a great choice for videos which are otherwise entertaining or informative.
Google are pretty good at working out when people like video results and when they prefer more generic shopping results and are getting better and better all the time. If users don't click on the video results - then it won't be long before those rich snippets are changed for a more appropriate form.
-
We have experiments up and running with youtube, wistia, and vimeopro.
So far we only see the youtube video's are indexed. (they indexed in just a few hours).
At this time, the youtube are NOT imbedded. In one case, it took the first position, in another, it took #3. Our related web page is still showing on the first page.
We will monitor and see what results we have over the next week. Curious to see what the imbeds do.
-
Thanks for the input, everyone.
I'm doing an informal experiment to test this theory. It's not perfectly controlled, but I think it will still be helpful.
I compiled a list product pages that I think are showing up lower in the SERP's because of having self-hosted videos.
Recorded the rankings of those pages (non-personalized) for the keywords we're targeting and then asked our content department to take down the videos on those pages.
I'll follow up in a week or two once Google recrawls those pages to see if the rankings have changed.
-
Mmmm, I didn't see anything in that article that addressed the possibility of self-hosted hurting your ranking -- though I'd love to see any research done on the topic if you have references.
I'll be the first to admit I don't have good research or testing, but my anecdotal experience is the same as several posters above: a page is ranking well, and the addition of a self-hosted video targeting the same keywords results in a video listing that is lower in the SERPs replacing the original page listing. Removing the video causes the page to bounce back up to its original, higher, ranking. It seems that for many searches Google does not want to deliver a video result up at the top.
Another concern that I have with self-hosting videos is if the search is for a product, a large number of searchers don't want to watch a video, they want to buy something (and of course some want the video). But the ones looking to just buy may skip the video result in favor of what looks more like a shopping page result -- which is another reason why unless it's a truly video-oriented search or linkbait, I prefer to go to YouTube and go for multiple rankings.
-
Right... when we lost a #1 position to a universal search result our video was hosted on youtube but embedded on our webpage. The clicks went to our website.
Phil... great info in that blog post.. Now I know who to listen to about video. Thanks!
-
Hi Julie,
I would sincerely advise against that approach for product videos. See my recent post on the topic. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo
Self-hosting will have nothing to do with Google's choice of position for the ranking.
-
I have seen this happen, specifically when the video is self-hosted. Obviously the way to test if it's really the video and not the algorithm in your case is to remove the video and see how the SERPs shake out. If you're #1 position returns, then you know for certain (but I think it's very likely that the video is at fault).
The only real way around this I've found (without doing duplicate pages) is to use YouTube to host your videos, optimize them on YouTube and embed the YouTube video. The YouTube video will rank entirely separately from your site -- but of course clicks on the result will take you to YouTube and not your site, though you can toss a link to your site at the very top of the YouTube description.
-
So, I think it's entirely feasible that Google have chosen to rank you lower in the page, but with a video rich snippet - but it may not be the case at all, you may have just lost rankings due to an algorithm update.
Video results are often given position 3 in the SERPs, but i've seen them appear elsewhere too. If there are a number of video results for a term which suggests a video result would be the best return i.e: "Tutorial", then these results can rank in the top positions.
However, the question i would be interested to hear the answer to is "Have you lost traffic?". Video rich snippets in position three often have a higher click through rate than the top result. If you've got lots of nice rich snippets (albeit with lower ranking), but are maintaining or growing your traffic - then clearly you're in a better position than you were before.
Google may also choose to not rank video results if it feels like videos are not appropriate for the search query. It's not always consistent with this, which is why you may have got some of your products getting the rich snippets, but not others.
What wont happen is that you receive a main listing and a second video snippet result for the same page. Video results are basically page results, but with extra metadata to indicate that there is a video on the page.
If this has caused you to lose traffic, then you could try putting the videos on a different page (with supporting text and content) for each product - and optimise those pages for longer tail keywords around your product, while letting the main product page rank for the head term. I wouldn't really recommend that though, as it will spread your link equity thinner and seems somewhat superfluous.
-
As someone who is getting close to adding several thousand videos to product pages...... I now have a new concern. I would love to see an expanded topic / research on this.
-
Oh... doesn't that make you mad?
The same thing happened to me.
We held #1 position for a trophy term and had a video on that page. Then when google decided to display the video as a universal search result, our #1 listing disappeared.
We lost a lot of traffic because the video appeared near position #6 in the SERPs. We moved the video to a different page of the website. Several weeks later our video result disappeared and we went back to #1.
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
-
Consolidating product pages during website migration
Hello, We are an e-commerce & content site undergoing a website migration and redesign in the coming months. We will be getting an entirely new website. Many of our URLs will be changing: Current URL setup: www.mysite.com/catalog/SKU12345/product-title-here
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katelynroberts
Future URL setup: www.mysite.com/catalog/product-title-here So we're aware we will be using plenty of 301 redirects to achieve this. Further to this though, we currently have a product page for each configuration of a product - for example, a single-sided bookmark has its own page and URL, and the double-sided version of the same bookmark has its own page and URL. In our site redesign, we are hoping to consolidate each of these instances into one product page where users can select single or double-sided and the price will update accordingly. The bookmark URLs would then go from:
_www.mysite.com/catalog/SKU12345/bookmark-single-sided _(call this URL A for simplicity)www.mysite.com/catalog/SKU67890/bookmark-double-sided (call this URL B) To (after migrating to the new URL structure for the new site, and the now-consolidated single- & double-sided product pages):
www.mysite.com/catalog/bookmark (call this URL C) What is the best way to make this transition without losing too much of our SEO value? I understand there is nearly always traffic loss with URL changes but I'd like to at least minimize the damage as best I can. We have backlinks and ranks for many product pages so I want to make sure we pass as much of this as we can. (And is this at all further complicated by the fact that URL A & B won't exist on the new site, and URL C doesn't exist on the current site? Does this impact the use of the 301 redirects and if so, how?) Are we better off to approach this page consolidation after the site migration and treat it as a separate project? This is something that is important to our user experience, and is definitely a change we want to make. Any advice is appreciated - thank you! I'm a fairly beginner-intermediate SEO so this is all somewhat new but I want to be able to at least convey some understanding to our developer of what we need to do. I was able to find this discussion (https://moz.com/community/q/merging-pages-and-seo) which describes a similar situation and solutions if we were just consolidating the pages but doesn't quite have the complicating factor of the entire site migration happening at the same time. Thanks so much!0 -
Marking Ads As Ads
In marking paid ads as "advertisement" for the sake of Google organic, if you have a block of small ads, do you have to mark each and every one as an advertisement? For instance, let's say you have a block of small ads in the right column... mark each one or just at the top or what? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
What to do about similar product pages on major retail site
Hi all, I have a dilemma and I'm hoping the community can guide me in the right direction. We're working with a major retailer on launching a local deals section of their website (what I'll call the "local site"). The company has 55 million products for one brand, and 37 million for another. The main site (I'll call it the ".com version") is fairly well SEO'd with flat architecture, clean URLs, microdata, canonical tag, good product descriptions, etc. If you were looking for a refrigerator, you would use the faceted navigation and go from department > category > sub-category > product detail page. The local site's purpose is to "localize" all of the store inventory and have weekly offers and pricing specials. We will use a similar architecture as .com, except it will be under a /local/city-state/... sub-folder. Ideally, if you're looking for a refrigerator in San Antonio, Texas, then the local page should prove to be more relevant than the .com generic refrigerator pages. (the local pages have the addresses of all local stores in the footer and use the location microdata as well - the difference will be the prices.) MY QUESTION IS THIS: If we pull the exact same product pages/descriptions from the .com database for use in the local site, are we creating a duplicate content problem that will hurt the rest of the site? I don't think I can canonicalize to the .com generic product page - I actually want those local pages to show up at the top. Obviously, we don't want to copy product descriptions across root domains, but how is it handled across the SAME root domain? Ideally, it would be great if we had a listing from both the .com and the /local pages in the SERPs. What do you all think? Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKelly0 -
Working to Start an Shopping Idea Site - Which Totally Based On Scraping product from Ecom. How Quickly I should Add products and categories in this new domain.
How Quickly I should Add products and categories in this new domain. We are going to start its promotional by google adwords and facebook. I worrying about 10000's of product pages. kindly guide me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innovatebizz0 -
Will SEO cause a drop in the number of impressions?
Hello, I have been a member of the Moz community for a long time. I very seldom ask questions here but this time I really need your help to make sure I will not make mistakes that will negatively affect my site. My site monetizes according to the number of impressions visualized by the users who visit it. I now want to try to optimize it by using all those nice SEO techniques I have learned through Moz. My goal is to make sure that if I use the various SEO strategies, I will still be able to obtain the high number of impressions I get now. If not, I prefer to leave the situation untouched and I will not start optimizing the site for SEO. Please kindly read the situation below and give me a little support to make sure I am doing the right thing. I would like to ask for your professional advice to solve and issue related to duplicate content. Please visit my site: www.chhedonna.it. The sitemap has indexed 21.890 articles, but if I digit the command 'site:www.chedonna.it', I obtain 158.000 results.I believe that the duplicated content has emerged due to three errors I would like to indicate in order for you to tell me whether my interpretation is correct or not: The article writers made a mistake in that although the content of the articles is different, they have employed the same title for all of them. Therefore, you can see 5 articles with similar/duplicated Tag Titles but the content of said articles is different. For example, http://www.chedonna.it/attualita/cronaca-rosagossip/2012/12/03/heidi-klum-senza-trucco-e-parrucco-foto and http://www.chedonna.it/attualita/cronaca-rosagossip/2012/12/03/heidi-klum-senza-trucco-e-parrucco-foto-2/ are different articles (i.e., the content of the articles is different from each other) that have been published using the same titles. If I inserted the 'follow-noindex' tag to 3 of the 4 duplicates, as shown in the example above, would that be a solution? I fear that if I did insert the follow-noindex, I would cause a drop in the number of impressions visualized by my site's users. It is important to point out, in fact, that I monetize the site via the number of impressions I generate. Therefore, it is fundamental that I do not compromise the number of impressions that the site gets, if I try to optimize it for SEO reasons. On the other hand, I believe that the idea to operate via a 'rel canonical' would not be right, considering that the content of every post having the same title is different, that is, the articles are different even if they focus on the same topic. Also, I would not find it beneficial to use a '301 redirect', since the number of duplicated Titles Tags is very consistent. 2. The second error concerns the duplicate content due to the images that have been included in the articles. For instance, http://www.chedonna.it/che-donna-di-mondo/fare-la-valigia/2012/08/06/campeggio-vacanza-in-liberta/attachment/tenda/ http://www.chedonna.it/che-donna-di-mondo/fare-la-valigia/2012/08/06/campeggio-vacanza-in-liberta/attachment/tenda-2/ http://www.chedonna.it/che-miss/2012/12/04/tatuaggi-fiore-di-loto-significato-e-foto/attachment/tatuaggio-fiore-di-loto-2/ http://www.chedonna.it/che-miss/2013/03/15/tatuaggi-fiore-di-loto-significato-e-foto-2/attachment/tatuaggio-fiore-di-loto-2-2/. I could solve this problem by preventing the media indexing. But I fear that this would produce a very high number of '404 error' messages. If such a thing did happen, my site would stop monetizing overall and I cannot allow this to occur, as you can understand. My very important question is the following: if I prevent the indexing of the photos, will I get in return a drop in the number of impressions that my site would normally generate? 3. Duplicate content generated by the indexing of archive subpages. For example: http://www.chedonna.it/tag/angelica-e-ferdinando/ http://www.chedonna.it/tag/angelica-e-ferdinando/page2/ http://wwwchedonna.it/tag/angelica-e-ferdinando/page3/ If I prevented the media indexing, will I get in return a drop in the number of impressions and many 404 errors? Thank you very much for taking the time to help me sort out this very important issue. Cheers, Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Can videos be considered duplicate content?
I have a page that ranks 5 and to get a rich snippet I'm thinking of adding a relevant video to the page. Thing is, the video is already on another page which ranks for this keyword... but only at position 20. As it happens the page the video is on is the more important page for other keywords, so I won't remove it. Will having the same video on two pages be considered a duplicate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brocberry0 -
Category Pages up - Product Pages down... what would help?
Hi I mentioned yesterday how one of our sites was losing rank on product pages. What steps do you take to improve the SERPS of product pages, in this case home/category/product is the tree. There isn't really any internal linking, except one link from the category page to each product, would setting up a host of internal links perhaps "similar products" linking them together be a place to start? How can I improve my ranking of these more deeply internal pages? Not just internal links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
From an SEO Standpoint, which is better for my product category URLs?
With our e-commerce store, we can customize the URL for the product categories, so we could have: http://www.storename.com/product-category-keywords/ or http://www.storename.com/product-category-keywords.html From an SEO standpoint (or even from a "trying to get links" standpoint), which would be better to have? I feel like having a *.html category page would be easier for link building, but that's just my personal feelings. Side Note: Our product pages are: http://www.storename.com/product-name.html Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fenderseo0