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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!

If we ever meet I will gladly buy!

Thanks!

I have a duplicate content warning in our PRO account (well several really) but I can't figure out WHY these pages are considered duplicate content.

They have different H1 headers, different sidebar links, and while a couple are relatively scant as far as content (so I might believe those could be seen as duplicate), the others seem to have a substantial amount of content that is different.  It is a little perplexing.

Can anyone help me figure this out?

Here are some of the pages that are showing as duplicate:

http://www.downpour.com/catalogsearch/advanced/byNarrator/narrator/Seth+Green/?bioid=5554

http://www.downpour.com/catalogsearch/advanced/byAuthor/author/Solomon+Northup/?bioid=11758

http://www.downpour.com/catalogsearch/advanced/byNarrator/?mediatype=audio+books&bioid=3665

http://www.downpour.com/catalogsearch/advanced/byAuthor/author/Marcus+Rediker/?bioid=10145

http://www.downpour.com/catalogsearch/advanced/byNarrator/narrator/Robin+Miles/?bioid=2075

Anyone have any good free resources for international SEO best practices?  I've read through most of the common stuff and wondered if there's anything I'm missing.

We are getting ready to launch a version of our website in the UK and I could use any hints or advice that could make my life easier.

My biggest question is whether to keep the sites as 1 site (single domain with sub-folder for sharing incoming link profile) or to get a .UK domain and do everything from scratch. (it seems like a sub-domain is not the way to go?).

I also wonder if any of you can share things to look out for, pitfalls, mistakes, etc...?

TIA for any help/answers!

I know that there are issues with reciprocal linking, and I'd choose to avoid it if I could, but the circumstance I have been put into may require me to do so.

Say we do it in the worst possible way. What is the worst case scenario here?

Is it possible to be hit with a site-wide penalty?

Is there a range of penalties? or you just get dinged or not?

Will the links themselves simply be devalued? and by how much? they loose half their juice? All of it?

And if you are penalized, how difficult would it be to recover?

Can you just ditch the recips? or is it a lot more difficult than that?

Obviously it has to do more with how you do it and what your site and the other site are like content-wise, but I just wanted to know what you think about the actual possible penalties and recovery.

TIA for any answers.

Thanks for your replies everyone.

We weren't sure if Google would look at JS removing the page navigation as cloaking or not, so that's still a bit of a concern. We were reading Rand's post from 2008 on the subject http://www.seomoz.org/blog/white-hat-cloaking-it-exists-its-permitted-its-useful and Matt Cutts' replies on the subject.  We know it was a few years ago, but he still seemed to be saying to be over-cautious with that kind of thing.

Should we be worried about cloaking if we use JS to "hide" the page nav?

My company is looking at replacing our ecommerce site's paginated browsing with a Javascript infinite scroll function for when customers view internal search results--and possibly when they browse product categories also. Because our internal linking structure isn't very robust, I'm concerned that removing the pagination will make it harder to get the individual product pages to rank in the SERPs.

We have over 5,000 products, and most of them are internally linked to from the browsing results pages in the category structure: e.g. Blue Widgets, Widgets Under $250, etc.

I'm not too worried about removing pagination from the internal search results pages, but I'm concerned that doing the same for these category pages will result in de-linking the thousands of product pages that show up later in the browsing results and therefore won't be crawlable as internal links by the Googlebot.

Does anyone have any ideas on what to do here? I'm already arguing against the infinite scroll, but we're a fairly design-driven company and any ammunition or alternatives would really help.

For example, would serving a different page to the Googlebot in this case be a dangerous form of cloaking? (If the only difference is the presence of the pagination links.) Or is there any way to make rel=next and rel=prev tags work with infinite scrolling?