Drink loads of cask ale. Loads of it.

I actually don't think you should make the judgement regarding what needs changing yourselves - or take my word for it either! That said, I agree that the points you mentioned are particularly problematic

Your initial starting point should be to source some data from actual users and user testing groups regarding their perceptions of the site - particularly looking at what may have prevent conversions or almost stopped people from converting. There's tons of information about this stuff (CRO) online - but I'd start with running the Panda questionnaire that i mentioned previously and then use http://www.usertesting.com/ to source some good feedback from a wider selection of individuals.

From here - you should then hire a designer or get a freelancer in, who can action this stuff and come up with a refreshed design.

Hi Shari,

This is a really interesting situation and, to be honest, I haven't seen anything quick like it before. All of the on-page information indicates that Google should not be indexing the pages you referenced with video snippets - yet, they are and with extremely unusual choices of thumbnail (the low quality of most of the thumbs would be my guess for the reason you've seen such a drop).

Therefore, my assessment, as you intimated, is that there were strange errors going on with the video sitemap that were attributing certain pages with videos and thumbnails not actually present on the page. If you've now fixed all of that in the sitemap (you seem to have have done), then in theory the snippets should fix themselves upon re-indexation, but I would expect this to take longer than two weeks in the majority of cases. From what I've observed, Google sort of treat their video index as slightly different to their general page index and so simply recrawling a page does not guarantee that the video sitemap entry has been reindexed.

So, my recommended action for you would be to wait it out for another 6 weeks or so and see if anything shifts. If not, drop me a private message and I'll happily look into this a bit further for you, mostly because it's a really interesting case and I'd like to work out what's going on.

In terms of fixing pages where you would like to keep the video present, but not have the video indexed - you can either remove the video sitemap entry for that page, or adjust the sitemap entry to include a more eye-catching and interesting thumbnail. You shouldn't need to remove the videos from the page, since you haven't implemented Schema mark-up or open graph tags on your videos - both of which can assist with indexation.

However, if none of the above works, then another plausible explanation for your situation may be that Google are trying to execute and index some of your JavaScript used in the side bar to serve the videos and in the process are getting very confused as to which page which video should be attributed to. If this is the case, you would need to look at a fundamental restructuring of the way you include video on your pages.

Please keep me updated with regards to the situation!

Thanks,

Phil.

Hi Jason,

In which case.... input and criticisms incoming

I can fully appreciate and support the intention you've had with these videos, but unfortunately I just don't think it delivers. The framing of the shots and size of the video on the page is extremely problematic because it's just not focused enough for me to actually be able to see what's going on with the products. A video that actually showed me what came out of the box and how it all fits together would zoom in on certain bits, have a voice over explaining how everything worked and would be quicker to give me the overview. Additionally, there are issues with the frames at the start and end. If you haven't been able to get some very basic animation together to show off your branding and the product at the beginning of the video, it doesn't suggest "quality" to me, but rather looks a bit amateur. I'm not sure why the video then ends with a slide suggesting people go to 3wisemonkeys.co.uk to find more information if they're only able to see this video when on the site..... And lastly, The music is also fairly sinister!

The speed issues I speak of are mainly an issue at the beginning where you have 10 seconds before we actually see anything of the product and instead just have a static text overlay and picture of the box that actually looks pretty unprofessional. I suggest looking at your Vimeo analytics to see how many users are dropping off early on in the video. If it's a significant percentage, this probably indicates my assessment has some merit.

My concern with the text isn't the quality of the written word, but rather how impenetrable it is. A wall of text split up into paragraphs is not easy to read through and does not immediately give me an idea of where to look to find the core information I might want if buying one of these - namely, what are the features and will it fit with my car? You also have issues of strange characters appearing under the bullet point sections.

I don't have any specific things to offer on the technical structure, though I agree the URLs aren't nice - but rather, the actual aesthetic of the site, to me, does not indicate legitimacy or quality. The site honestly looks like it's been designed by SEOs and IT experts, rather than anyone with a bit of creative flair or understanding of UI. If i were a manual reviewer on the Google webspam team, to be honest, I would think your site was on the borderline of being low quality. I suggest you look for some wider feedback on this by replicating the Google panda questionare (see here for some details on how to do this http://moz.com/blog/replicate-googles-panda-questionnaire-whiteboard-friday) and get a feel for what others think. Additionally, I'd recommend hiring a design, CRO or UI expert to help with improving the site.

Regarding SEO value of putting the video on the page, I don't think it'll necessarily help directly right now (there isn't much evidence for a direct correlation), but it's reasonable to expect that rich media types might be something Google would wish to reward down the line.

Your schema implementation seems fine, but I'd also recommend creating a video sitemap if you struggle with indexation, since this is typically a more surefire way of getting the videos indexed. The YouTube embed may also be confusing for Google with regards to "which video do i index", so a video sitemap would help with this as well.

However.... my main comment regarding the question of further value and improving rankings would be that you seriously need to look at your page types and the quality of the content you're creating.

I want to say this in the nicest possible way... but that video, and the page structure as a whole, is pretty bad. The video is incredibly slow moving and actually doesn't provide any valuable information, which could actively harm your conversion rate and bounce rate rather than help matters. I'd suggest you next spend time looking to improve your site design and structure - which should help improve your conversion rate. Following this, It'll be much easier for you to do things like link building which will help increase rankings.

I disagree with your assessment and advice here.

Through vimeo pro (which isn't the same as vimeo - confusing, i know) you can get your own site to rank rather than YouTube.com or Vimeo.com, which would likely be the preferable option here. Linking them together then becomes a bad idea - since it makes little sense for users.

Additionally, Google won't rank whichever it thinks is the original, as it has no mechanism to work out whether videos hosted on different platforms are the same thing. In such situations, Google actually rank whichever page is stronger and more relevant - which, for any site with a fairly weak domain - is normally the YouTube.com version.

That's not actually true Martin.

YouTube very very rarely drives much traffic back to your site. If you want traffic to your site, you're much better off securely hosting the content and driving traffic from Google with rich snippets - rather than forcing users to go to YouTube and then from there navigate to your site.

Hi Stephen,

I'd advise you to think of this approach as akin to posting a blog post on your own site and then also posting it on someone else's site as a guest blog post with an adjusted Title and meta description.

It's not going to get you "penalised" for duplicate content as such, but It's hardly a great strategy in the majority of cases - as it will force you to cannibalise possible traffic and link equity across the locations.

First of all, I'd really question why your client wants to do this. If they think that somehow they have to have content on YouTube as it represents a potential traffic source - I'd definitely be keen to point out (in spite of what others have said in answer to your question) that click through rate from YouTube videos back to websites in links and annotations is extremely low. It's very hard to drive any significant amount of traffic from YouTube except through putting videos out at extreme scale (more details here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-marketing-value-of-youtube)

Secondly - I'd suggest asking yourself whether the content in question is really appropriate for a YouTube audience anyway? Do the videos hold their value outside of your clients domain? Is there any search volume on YouTube (use the YouTube keyword tool) for the keywords you're going to be targeting?

If you do want to go down the YouTube + securely hosted route for the same content, then I've detailed the exact technical approach required here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo (approach 4) but bear in mind that it's extremely rare to have content stylistically appropriate for both securely hosting on your site with a paid hosting solution (so you get traffic) and seeding on YouTube (so you can build brand awareness  through that community). If the videos in question are commercial or product focused, I can basically all but guarantee they won't be worth putting on YouTube and they'll potentially outrank your clients site while diluting the overall traffic to the site itself.

So... in short, it's not a problem if you have the right kind of content - but 9 times out of 10 it's not a particularly smart strategy.

I hope that's useful!

Cheers,

Phil.

That wont work as the plugin only works with YouTube videos.

1. Do we need a separate video sitemap that either works alongside Google XML Sitemaps or replaces it?

You can integrate the video tags within your normal sitemap - or submit a separate one, whichever is more convenient for you. I'm afraid I'm not that familiar with the Google XML sitemaps plugin, but from what I do know, i don't think it included video tags within the sitemap - so if you wish to continue using this plugin, you'll need to submit a separate video sitemap

2. If we do need a video sitemap, what's the best video site map to get? (we are using the Thesis theme so can't use the Yoast one unfortunately as they don't play nice together...)

Yoast is the only video sitemap generator for Wordpress that is any good IMO - the rest don't work properly. So, unfortunately if you can't use that - then you'll need to manually create the video sitemaps or use something like this tool i built https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhK1-u_-nIZhdE5KdEFTYVJCN3M4Yk9Xb2pfY0hrQkE&usp=sharing to scale it out in excel.

Hi ZoraS,

In short - yes, I think this site is pretty spammy and I wouldn't recommend putting in the effort to get links there. More than likely these links won't help your rankings much anyway, while at scale they could actively harm you.