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Thanks Phil,

That was my guess, I just wanted confirmation, and between you and the folks at Wistia sounds like that's the most plausible explanation.

Thanks everyone for taking the time to help out with this!

So, I talked to Wistia and they said there may be an issue with the video not initializing on the page since it is behind a button/tab and not on the page to start with.  I was kind of expecting someone to say something about that, but no one did.  Is this a problem in anyone's view?  The code for the video IS in the page before the button is clicked.

Hmm...yeah, it doesn't show up, but it does detect the thumbnail url and I can verify that it works.

Hmm... interesting, since early January huh? I know someone on our side came around and added the button interface that effectively "hides" the video initially and you have to click the button to actually show the video on the page, so I was wondering if that had anything to do with it (the video is in the code still).  This is a possibility I hadn't considered.

I'd still like to hear if anyone has any other thoughts, but thanks for the link to the article, good information to have.

We started using Wistia for our video hosting, and our SERP results for the video pages were showing thumbnails in the results, but somewhere along the line we just stopped getting the thumbnails to show, and I'm not sure why.

Anyone have any ideas?

Search: Edward Asner Interview by Malcolm Hillgartner

We are both Blackstoneaudio.com and Downpour.com, and yes, I know there are issues with posting the content on both sites, more concerned with why the thumbnails disappeared from both sites.

I've been looking at a lot of Silo illustrations and reading a lot on the optimal silo structure lately.  In many of the illustrations I see the Silos are all linking down or up in the structure, but not much sidelong action.  But I read about how you are supposed to have a "mini sitemap" on each page in the silo that links to every other page in the silo.  Is this really a good idea?  Seems to me you would only want to link up & down in the structure, or at most have links to the "next" & "previous" parts of the silo (sideways).  Having all those links on a page would just dilute the link juice wouldn't it?  I hardly ever see illustrations for linking sideways between pages in a silo, yet there seems to be a lot of talk about it, which is correct?

I am having a difficult time determining how to silo the content for this website (douwnpour).

The issue I am having is that as I see it there are several different top-level keyword targets to put at the top of the silos, however due to the nature of the products they fit in almost every one of the top-level categories.

For instance our main keyword term is "Audio Books" (and derivatives thereof). but we also want to target "Audiobook Downloads" and "Books on CD".  Due to the nature of the products, almost every product would fit in all 3 categories.

It gets even worse when you consider normal book taxonomy.  The normal breakdown would be from audiobooks>Fiction(or Nonfiction).  Now each product also belongs to one of these categories, as well as "download", "CD", and "Audiobook".

And still worse, our navigation menus link every page on the site back to all of these categories (except audiobooks, as we don't really have a landing page for that besides the home page, which is lacking in optimized content, but is linked from every page on the site.)

So, I am finding siloing, or developing a cross-linking plan that makes sense very difficult.  It's much easier at the lower levels, but at the top things become muddy.  Throw in the idea that we may eventually get e-books as well, and it gets even muddier.

I have some ideas of how to deal with some of this, such as having the site navigation put in an i frame, instituting basic breadcrumbs, and building landing pages, but I'm open to any advice or ideas that might help, especially with the top level taxonomy structure.

TIA!

Thanks for the reply it's much appreciated!

yes, looking at the battle map now...may have to find another way...

I am also curious how others handle this.

I just realized yesterday while doing some audit work on our site (which is still relatively new) that all of our audio assets are stored on a separate sub-domain.

We are an eCommerce site that sells audio books, and every product page has a sample audio file to listen to.  But all those files are stored on a sub-domain of the main site.  "cdn-media.oursite.com".

First, I understand that media(our audio files) has some inherent SEO value if hosted correctly.  Is that true?  And if so, how important would you think it is?

Secondly, assuming that it does have value, are we losing that value by having them hosted on a sub-domain?  I have read things that say sub-domains are bad, and I have read things that say that Google at least has been treating sub-domains as sub-folders, but I can't find anything definitive one way or the other.

On another note, another thing I saw is that people are linking to the sound files directly in various places, and those links are going to the sub-domain, not the main domain.  There aren't even pages on the sub-domain, just the files, so those links deliver a "visitor" to a page that is completely blank except for a tiny little audio player.  Not sure what to do about that, but that can't be good one way or the other right?

How big of a problem is this really?  Is it worth me going to our IT dept. and trying to change it?  It sounds like it would be a pretty big deal to change, so I'll need a few voices to back me up if that's the case.

Beautiful, I will try it out!