Welcome to the Q&A Forum

We've recently moved to using YouTube for embedded videos on our site. We have a number of videos that are embedded and then a larger number of videos which are part of our YouTube channel.

I've been reading recently that it's possible to get Google to list embedded video links pointing to your site rather than to YouTube itself. I am interesting in driving traffic directly from the search results to our pages rather than via YouTube. Could somebody provide a basic step by step guide on how to do this please? Or is this something that is not possible? I've been doing a lot of research online but, sadly, can't work out how to do this.

Hi Edmund,

I'll let the more experienced members of this forum answer your question in more detail. One thing I've learnt over the last 8 months though is that there seldom are any quick wins

One 'quick win' that we're implementing here though is Google authorship tags. You can use these to link your content (in this case a blog?) to a Google + account. When setup, this means that rich snippets such as your photo appear in the SERPs which can increase CTR and your visibility on the page. It is also possible that Google has / will implement this into their algorithm to assess the overall authority of your page via an 'author rank'.

I'm not sure you'd see any difference in your SEOMoz Domain Authority, but it is a quick easy win that is becoming fairly standard these days

Go to http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986 to learn more.

Thanks,

John

I agree with Bendall that sampling is what is most likely causing your problem here. You may find this post useful: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1042498?hl=en-GB

I suspect that the reason that your sampled total closely matches the total of individually downloaded monthly data is because sampled data is Google's 'best guess' when the data in the date range becomes too large. This best guess is based on sound statistics, but ultimately there will be some variances. I've found these variances get bigger the larger your site and the larger your date range. Google do this to reduce load on their servers as crunching the numbers for large data sets can be very resource intense. You COULD upgrade to Google Analytics Premium which gives you un-sampled data as standard, but this is very expensive and only really suitably for large organisations.

There is no easy way round this I'm afraid. I'd suggest that you think about what level of data you are comfortably using - sampled data can still give you valuable insights / trends. Some are comfortable with using sampled data (I prefer now too). I believe there are some tools that allow you to download un-sampled data from Google Analytics via their API but I have not tried these.

Thank you all - basic stuff I know. All three of your answers put together answer my question so excellent stuff.

It's interesting that even when I've moved onto more complicated SEO concepts a simple issue coming out of the blue is the one that throws me. Maybe this shows that sometimes it's best to keep things simple?

I’m currently trying to implement Matt Cutt’s advice from a recent YouTube video, in which he said that it was better to have no meta descriptions at all than duplicates.

I know that there are better alternatives, but, if forced to make a choice, would it be better to remove all duplicate meta descriptions from a site than to have duplicates (leaving a lone meta tag description on the home page perhaps?). This would be a short term fix prior to making changes to our CMS to allow us to add unique meta descriptions to the most important pages.

I’ve seen various blogs across the internet which recommend removing all the tags in these circumstances, but I’m interested in what people on Moz think of this.

The site currently has a meta description which is duplicated across every page on the site.

Thanks for your reply Everett, that definitely answers the main part of my question,

I'd be interested if anyone has any experience in using the Confluence add-ons for SEO?

Thanks Marc for answering what is in many ways an unfair question.

I definitely agree that the long term objective should be different and relevant meta descriptions as you say. It's also good to know that each of the approaches I suggested were ultimately bad practice, even if one of them is less bad than the other.

They are a society that is linked to an academic institution. I don't know if there are any other factors pushing them from ac.uk to co.uk I'm afraid. It sounds like this is something that I should clarify with them when I talk to them.

Thanks for the advice!

Thanks for the clarification Don - much appreciated

Excellent - thanks for your responses guys, that's a great help!

Could someone help me with a 'what if ' scenario please?

What happens if I publish a piece of content on an external website, but then later decide to also put this content on my website. I want my website to rank first for this content, even though the original location for the content was the external website.

Would it be okay for me to put a rel=canonical tag on the external website's content pointing to the copy on my website? Or would this be seen as manipulative?

Thanks for answering my question Dirk! I found the deeper follow up conversation interesting as well.