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I suspected that those related products being marked up might not have been good. Good to know. We'll for sure test that out.

Thanks for the recommendation on the blog post and for your help!

Hello,

I work with two ecommerce sites and we've implemented product and review schema back in mid-May. Since implemented, I've seen some of the product prices and review stars start to show up in Google, however, now it seems to be long gone. I've tested sample URLs in Google's rich snippet testing tool and no errors come up and it looks like we have all the required components needed for each schema type.

I know Google doesn't for sure show schema, but these sites are a decent size and trustworthy enough where I think they would be showing it.

Does anyone have an idea on what I'm missing? Have you experienced something like this?

Thanks in advance.

I work on a couple ecommerce sites that are on IIS. Both sites have return a 200 header status for the CAPS and non CAPS version of the URLs. While I suppose it would be ok if the canonicals pointed to the same version of the page, in some cases it doesn't (ie; /Home-Office canonicalizes to itself and /home-office canonicalizes to itself). I came across this article (http://www.searchdiscovery.com/blog/case-sensitive-urls-and-seo-case-matters/) that is a few years old and I'm wondering how much of an issue it is and how I would determine if it is/isn't?

I work with a number of ecommerce sites that have dynamically-created urls based off of product attributes we've assigned in our cms. I am updating a handful of these attributes to more seo-friendly terms because they are outdated but am not certain how to go about redirecting all the urls that each attribute is in/could be in.

For example: If I had the attributes hoagie and beanie and changed them to sandwich and headwear, a dynamic url might change like this:

• .com/hoagie/french-bread ---> .com/sandwich/french-bread
• .com/beanie/hoagie/novelty ----> .com/headwear/sandwich/novelty

Since the urls are dynamically created, I am not sure how I go about redirecting all of them, or if I need to redirect all of them at all (instead just redirecting the urls indexed by Google, etc.)

I also have a number of links within copy on each of the sites that contain linked anchor text using attributes that will be changing. I am assuming I will need to 301 each of these or update them manually to reflect the new attributes.

I am new to the seo field and would appreciate any and all advice or direction to guides and tutorials that could aid me with this project.  Thanks!

Agreed. It took about a week to get the thumbs in the SERP, so hopefully I'll have some more information within a week.

Hi Phil,

Here are the URLs in question:

• http://www.nationalbusinessfurniture.com/Reception-Desks-Type.aspx
• The traffic didn't change too much for this page, but the rank briefly increased from 6 to 3 for "reception desk" - currently at 5
• http://www.nationalbusinessfurniture.com/L-Desks-Type.aspx
• This page experienced the traffic drop and briefly increased rank from 8 to 6 for "l shaped desk" - currently at 8

I just submitted an updated sitemap to try to change the video_loc to a product page to get the thumbnail removed from the SERPs for the L-Desks page and change out the thumbnail for the Reception-Desks page to one that reads "Shop Reception Desks" in big letters with branding, etc. I also added the autoplay directive on the updated version, which I've seen doesn't always work.

These videos are technically relevant, however, they are also product specific. We have multiple videos on our product pages so I figured using one in the SERPs for a category page would attract people to our site where they could find many more product videos.

Any insight would be appreciated!

Thanks for your response. I was so excited to realize I could control which videos Google puts in the SERPs, having this traffic drop was a major bummer.

I looked in the SEO > Landing Pages  section of Google Analytics (which pulls from Google Webmaster Tools - so not exact numbers) and it does show that both pages have had a dramatic decrease in CTR (from 4% to less than 1%) . However, it also shows that they've had a decrease in Impressions. Both of these pages are ranking in the top 10 for their highest keyword.

My guess would be that Google may not be serving up the page as often as they were to certain searchers and/or long tail queries because of a video being associated. I'm going to change the thumbnail on one of them and try to get the thumbnail taken off of the other by changing the video content_loc on the video sitemap to a less prominent page.

Interesting note: Since we first started embedding videos on our pages, Google had been intermittently including video thumbnails to the SERPS based on when/if Google picked up on them by crawling our pages naturally. However, when I added a more extensive XML sitemap, Google removed all the videos from the SERPs and we saw a dramatic increase in traffic with no visible dramatic change in ranks (aka the ranks we are watching didn't change).

So I'm hoping the video sitemap will ensure Google only uses the videos on the pages we tell them to. If not, I'll have to talk to my developer on how to ensure Google doesn't pick up on the video links on the page.

At least now I know how not to use videos! Interesting stuff.

So my company has created a large amount of videos and I took a couple of them and created a test video sitemap to see what effect adding a video thumbnail/rich snippet to the SERPs would be.

It worked on one page and gained 2 spots (position 6 to 4) for the highest keyword, but traffic didn't increase too much. Then a week later I tested it with the page that we get the most organic traffic for, which is ranking for a very big keyword. It worked and gained a bit of ranking, but traffic decreased 50% ever since according to Google Analytics.

It seems to me that the traffic from users clicking on the video thumbnail is not be tracked as google / organic even though it lands them on the intended page/doesn't redirect anywhere else. I've looked to see if traffic to this page increased overall to see if it was being tracked via a referral or as something else, but couldn't find any traffic discrepancy. The only thing I did find is that impressions under SEO > Landing Pages > Video Property increased, but this could be from the page ranking in the Video SERPs now.

Has anyone experienced a similar situation? Do you think having a video snippet could be that big of a turn off for customers that people just aren't clicking like they used to? I don't think so, that's why I'm leaning towards a tracking discrepancy in Google Analytics.

Hi Kasy,

I'm curious - did you sign on with Catch Marketing?

Thanks.

Hi,

I've been watching the Total Indexed number for 4 domains that I work with for the last few months. In Google Webmaster Tools three of them were holding steady up until August-September, when suddenly they started declining by hundreds of thousands of URLs a week.

I've asked my IT department and they say they haven't done anything technically different in the last few months that would affect indexation. I've also searched on google and on search marketing blogs to see if anyone else has experience this to no avail.

As you can see in the image, the "Not Selected" pages have not increased so it appears this is not due to duplicate content (of which we have a lot). However, the "Ever Crawled" number is increasing.

The only reasonable answer that I can conclude is that Google is now de-indexing inactive URLs? Anyone have a better answer?

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