Drink loads of cask ale. Loads of it.
Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

Best posts made by PhilNottingham
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RE: How Can You Get the Most out of Attending Mozcon?
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RE: Getting a video displaying a lightbox indexed
Without having explored the page and the sitemap, I would say that what your developer says is entirely possible and represents a good way forward from your situation.
Google have made a shift in the past few months with the way they index sitemaps - and if everything more or less matches up, even if they can't see the video on the page, they will often ascribe the page with a rich snippet and index the page as if there is a video present.
It's not surefire and having the video hidden beneath JS and delivered dynamically can prevent content being indexed - but it's certainly worth giving it a go (especially if you're using Wistia, as it's a simple process) and seeing if the video content gets indexed anyway. If it doesn't work, then I'd recommend going back and seeing if you can find a way to make the embed visible outside of the JS (perhaps just hide it with CSS and make it visible in a separate tab?). You could then have two methods of triggering the video playback for users if you wish.
Cheers,
Phil.
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RE: Multiple You-Tube Channels for Geo-Targeting ??
It's hard to offer really concrete advice without a bit more information on the specific context in question, but here are some general pointers:
- You probably shouldn't duplicate the content across YouTube channels. You can't Geotarget YouTube channels and in practice, this is not really any different from having duplicate content across multiple websites. If you do duplicate the content, you'll cannibalise the effectiveness of the videos ranking on both YouTube and Google organic searches, plus you'll split the view count which will harm your YouTube optimisation.
- Absolutely 100% do not put the sales focused product videos on YouTube - as in doing so you'll drive traffic to YouTube instead of your own site, which means you're adding an unnecessary step in the conversion funnel which will probably cost you money. You cannot sell from a YouTube channel and external links on YouTube get extremely low click through rates, with very very few people going to YouTube to search for products to buy (you only go to YouTube to watch a video). There is a bit more information about this for you in these links: http://moz.com/blog/the-marketing-value-of-youtube , http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy, http://moz.com/videos/view/2013/building-a-winning-video-marketing-strategy
- Annotated external links do not get clicked very often, I wouldn't rely on this as a strategy at all. It basically won't work.
- You can't geotarget annotations, no.
So, in short - I probably recommend just having a single channel and only putting the entertaining videos on YouTube. bear in mind that YouTube doesn't drive much traffic, so your goal here should be brand awareness, not traffic acquisition.
I hope that's useful!
Thanks,
Phil
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RE: Should we stream videos from a subdomain or subfolder?
Cool.
To be honest, it really doesn't matter a great deal. i would be inclined to go down the subdomain route - just because it makes it easier if you want to shift things up and move them to another domain later on, but that's entirely personal preference.
Often video files are hosted on totally different domains, such as when you're using a 3rd party player and hosting solution and it doesn't seem to make any difference with regards to getting good video results.