Please, help me to understand these Google results

[fablau]

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!

[fablau]

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!

[Dr-Pete]

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.

[fablau]

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?

[fablau]

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!

[jesse-landry]

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.

[fablau]

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??!!

[jesse-landry]

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)

[vmialik]

can you expound a bit why wistia vs youtube (being the #2 search engine?)

[jesse-landry]

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)

[jesse-landry]

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)

[JMacSupply]

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