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Hi Ajay,

Great question. First off, I think that both a video sitemap and the correct schema optimizations are extremely important in getting your videos to rank. Personally, I would start off with creating a video sitemap and then branch off into utilizing schema. This is just a matter of preference for me because I like to get the foundational elements done first.

In terms of what tools you can use - I know of a few. If your site is in WordPress the Yoast Video SEO plugin has worked well for me in the past. If not, here are some great posts on Video Sitemaps and the best process for creating them.

https://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/

https://moz.com/blog/video-sitemap-guide-for-vimeo-and-youtube

Hope that helps!

Serge

Hi Brian,

Here are my thoughts around your questions:

1. You mention that the videos aren't tagged or optimized well. If this is a main reason for creating a new channel I would suggest you create a plan for going back and optimizing/tagging all of your current videos instead.

2. Instead of creating an entirely new channel, could you rebrand yours? Change the name, logo, links, etc. but keep the videos, views, shares, etc.

3. In terms of SEO - YouTube takes user signals (views, shares, interactions) into account for ranking videos. I would say if there's anyway you could retain your current YouTube channel, do that. However, if you have to create a new YouTube you can get newer videos ranking fairly well by optimizing them correctly as well as adding them to a video sitemap and utilizing schema.

Hope that helps!

References:

http://searchengineland.com/youtube-ranking-factors-getting-ranked-second-largest-search-engine-225533

Hi Zack,

Great question. First of all, I haven't gotten to play with the official AMP plugin for Wordpress yet, but I've been researching and reading about the implementation of AMP pages within Wordpress for a while now.

First of all — it's recommended that you utilize AMP pages if you are a publisher or push out content often. In other words, AMP is not ideal (yet) for ecommerce, casual bloggers, etc. You can definitely try it out, but AMP was specifically designed for publishers that churn out a lot of content.

To answer your question regarding duplicate content — From my understanding, the proper way of implementing AMP pages and avoiding duplicate content is to put a canonical tag on your main page that points to the AMP page (this way Google sees that you have an AMP version of this page), as well as adding a canonical tag on the AMP page that points to the regular page.

In other words, you would have something like this.

Main Page

AMP Page

Here's Google's take on this.

i'm assuming that the plugin will automatically add the correct code to the pages, but I have not tested it so I wouldn't know for sure. Please do let us know if you end up testing this out!

Also, you might want to check out Yoast's "Glue" plugin for editing and adjusting AMP pages. It seems like it could be helpful.

Cheers

Hi there,

Great question.

The short answer:

• You can't control whether or not Google shows sitelinks for your site.
• If Google decides to show sitelinks for your site, you can't control which ones they show.
• The best you can do is optimize your site hierarchy, internal links, and on-page elements as best as possible to make it clear (and simple) for Google to crawl and understand seperate sections of your site.

Google used to have a "sitelink demotion" tool that let you submit links you wanted removed from sitelinks that were showing up for your domain. Google got rid of that function earlier this year. Either way, it was the opposite of what you are trying to achieve (get sitelinks showing for your domain).

Google's recommendation is to "...make sure you use anchor text and alt text that's informative, compact, and avoids repetition."

In other words, make sure your site has a clear hierarchy, that internal links are pointing to important sections of the site, that anchor text is descriptive, that pages are optimized clearly, and of course that your site being crawled accurately.

Hope that helps!

Hi,

There could be a variety of things that could have caused this, but I would start by asking a few questions:

1. Did the drop happen quickly? Did it go from positions 1-3 to 20 below in a day or two?
2. Is the SERP volatile? Has there been lots of movement for the SERP historically?
3. Have other sites in your space seen negative drops? I know there has been a lot of movement in the last few weeks.

Some general things I would jump into to start looking:

• Core technical elements.

• Was the page de-indexed somehow?

• Was the page canonicalized elsewhere?

• Did the core on-page elements get re-targeted to another term or removed?

• General health of homepage/site

• Is your backlink profile healthy? Did you ever purchase links/did someone purchase negative links to your domain?

• Is your content scraped or duplicated across other sites?

• Is your website mobile friendly?

• Does your site load quicker than 5 seconds?

• As Nikki mentioned, it's also important to look at who is ranking now.

• What is the DA of their site compared to yours? Is it much higher?

• Is their quality of content better?

If the drop happened quickly it's likely that something technical went wrong or you've been hit with an obvious penalty.

If it's happened over months, it's probably less obvious and could be multiple things.

I know that's not a straight answer, but those are some starting points I could think of with the information provided. Hope that is helpful!

Hi there,

First off, I think you made a good call on changing the URL structure and title tags. It sounds like you are seeing positive results from an organic ranking perspective as well as a user experience perspective (this is particularly beneficial because UX plays such a vital role in organic rankings now).

To answer/bring up your specific concerns...

1. How important is the product code to each individual product? If your company is B2B and these product codes are extremely helpful for other businesses I would say it's definitely worth considering. However, if your company sells standard items directly to customers, I think this concern would vary from product-to-product. In other words, if you think there is a substantial amount of users who are searching for the product code, this is something I would consider.

2. In terms of including the brand in the title tag, I would say yes. I don't have much backstory on who your customers are and what you are selling to them, but just based off of this information I would say it would be more beneficial to include the brand name in the title tag. Something like you suggested would work great. "BRAND1 - Product Name - Your company name" would be another way to think about it.

Hope that helps!

Great question.

As recommended by Andrew, I would definitely check your site's robots.txt file to ensure those pages or sections of the site aren't being blocked.

Secondly, I would check your sitemap and make sure there aren't any errors within it. Often times if your sitemap is inaccurate Google might decide to not index certain pages.

Doing a site:search for your website will help you understand what pages are showing up as well. Beyond this, you can do a site:search and enter a keyword for one of the landing pages that isn't being indexed by Google. If that page shows up, you know it's indexed.

Often times GSC doesn't give us 100% accurate data and therefore it's good to do these checks yourself. It's important to note that Google doesn't have to index certain pages if it doesn't find them useful for one reason or another. This is something we don't have much control of, however I doubt that is the case here.

Do the steps I mentioned above and let me know if you find anything interesting. Respond with your findings and we can try and get to the bottom of your specific issue. Hope that helps!

Hi! To answer your question—that's totally fine, as long as the canonical tags are pointing to non-trailing on product URLs and trailing on blog URLs, this shouldn't be a big deal.

There are other things to consider like internal linking (and making sure that's consistent across the site) and possibly choosing one version (like trailing slash) and force redirecting the rest (to ensure things are clean when it comes to URLs).

But as far as the direct question goes, as long as your canonicals are set accurately for those sections it shouldn't be a problem.

Hope that helps!

Hi there,

In terms of your questions:

• Deleting images or pages spammy links point to won't help since the links will still point to your domain regardless of if the place they are pointing to results in a 200 status. Also, I wouldn't recommend deleting any images or pages if they are important to the site!
• If you did remove assets or pages, it would have no impact on your domain authority.

If I were in your shoes, I would disavow the extremely spammy links and then carry on with other projects (building the brand/audience). If you're still concerned with spammy links coming in, I'd recommend setting up a framework to update your disavow file every ~6 months or so. Google has gotten good about ignoring a lot of clearly spammy links, but I still like to disavow the really bad ones just in case.

Also, don't forget that domain authority is just a metric that tries to represent the overall strength of a domain based on links. Google doesn't actually use DA (although it's likely they use something similar) so I wouldn't stress too hard about increasing DA (although that might be the lever you need to pull).

In short, I would:

• Disavow the really bad links.
• Do that once every 6-12 months if you're concerned.
• Move forward with other forward-thinking tasks like building out content hubs, building the brand up, working on social presence, etc.

Hope that helps!

A few unordered thoughts:

• I don't think that the URL alone is what's causing the blog to outrank the homepage. Some causes are probably that the content is better suited towards "plastic cups", the on-page optimization is more specific towards "plastic cups", or that the blog post has more internal/external links pointing to it. Also could be a combination of any/all of these.
• If your main topic for the site is around plastic cups, then the homepage should probably rank for it. In which case you could 301 the blog post to the homepage, and ensure that the homepage is targeting "plastic cups" as best as possible and that the content suits that keyword well.
• If the main topic for the website isn't plastic cups, then I would argue that it's OK that the blog post ranks—take that and use the homepage to target something else entirely and just make sure the CTA on the blog post is appropriate.

The way to let Google know your homepage is most relevant for the term:

1. Redirect blog post to homepage.
2. Ensure homepage has well written and helpful content around the topic.
3. Ensure homepage targeting (title tag, h1, etc) is focused on the topic.
4. Re-submit sitemap to Google for re-crawling and wait for a few days/possibly a week.

Hope that's helpful!

Hi there,

I haven't seen this warning from Google but reading their guidelines suggests that perhaps your site has been hacked or maybe you're running some ads that have content embedded that would trigger this warning?

Having a link to a site that doesn't use HTTPs shouldn't cause this warning to appear... maybe others have a different experience? Interesting to hear what others say.

Exactly - I would do the same and make sure to mark them as fixed. Also worth noting that if you have a lot of errors showing up, it could be easier to mark everything as fixed first and then check back in a week or two to get the actual bad URLs to appear versus having to go through a bunch that may or not be accurate anymore.

You are absolutely correct about AMP being geared towards news publishers (as of now). There are enormous benefits and opportunities for players within this space.

I have a feeling that AMP version 2 will include a lot of updates for other sites (such as ecommerce, etc.)

Also, I've heard that WordPress developers are building AMP plugins that will automatically convert pages to AMP if you want. Also, I saw someone mentioning that WordPress was actually going to build this into their CMS eventually.

Essentially, there are a lot of things up in there for sites that aren't news publishers. It will be interesting where AMP goes in the near future!

Hi there,

There could be a lot of reasons why certain pages of your website are dropping out of your index. Could you answer the following questions to help us narrow down the possible cause?

• How long ago did you switch to https?
• Have you submitted both non-www and www versions of the https site to Google Search Console (GSC)?
• Have you kept the http versions of your website in GSC?
• From the looks of it, your sitemap has been updated to reflect the https pages. Have you submitted the updated sitemap to GSC?
• Are there any sitemap errors appearing in GSC? Any other errors?
• Could you attach a screenshot of the indexation rate on both https and http versions of the site from GSC?
• Could you confirm that all redirects were done 1-to-1 and properly redirected? (301s and not 302s)

Some things that we could rule out:

• It looks like the site isn't using noindex tags in a way that would cause deindexing
• It looks like the robots.txt file isn't disallowing any important paths that would cause deindexation
• The http version of the www and non-www pages redirects to the www, https version of the site which is good
• Canonicals seem to be updated and pointing to the https version of the site

Sorry for all of the questions, I just want to make sure and rule out possible causes to focus in on what the issue could be.

Thanks, Serge

Hi there,

I haven't used the areaServed markup, but here are my thoughts:

• If your business _actually _serves all the different areas you are marking up, the markup is legitimate and therefore should be safe. However, if you are trying to manipulate/be spammy with your markup Google could penalize the site.
• In terms of how Google will read the markup, that's a tough question to answer. If there aren't any errors with it in Google's schema testing tool then it's safe to assume that if Google chooses to read/consider the schema markup it would understand that "x business provides services to the following areas".
• Where your business appears on the local pack is determined by many different inputs (such as reviews, quality/quantity of local listings, schema, etc.) I would imagine if Google chooses to consider this particular markup it could help your business appear in more local mack packs if the competition isn't much stronger when it comes to reviews, an actual brick and mortar location, etc.

Hope that's somewhat helpful—happy for anyone to disagree/jump in with more information.

Hi Brian,

Google can definitely crawl Javascript, although it is limited in a sense. Here is a great article addressing this.

I have seen many websites use the solution that you mention in your second paragraph. That is, creating a separate section of the domain (or creating a subdomain) for users who are logging in. GoogleBot will not be able to crawl anything that is beyond a login portal, so this is the most common solution. Of course you can also disallow the specific path or subdomain in robots.txt as well!

It comes down to how much content that you have behind the login portal. You want to figure out which part of your site you want to be crawled, and which parts you don't want. After that point it's a matter of figuring out the best solution for blocking that content from crawlers.

Hope that helps!

Hi there,

A few things:

• If there are thousands of pages on your site that only contain a video per page, that would be considered thin content from an SEO perspective. If you are trying to fix that I would recommend adding a noindex tag to all of the video pages, resubmitting those URLs to search console (or wait until Google crawls them), and then once the pages are removed from in the index I would add a disallow rule in the robots.txt file to prevent Google from crawling them.
• Another question: does the subdomain have any other content? Are the videos used elsewhere? It sounds like the videos themselves could be valuable from a business perspective and SEO is only one part of a site's success - I'd be thinking about how else I could utilize them in search (or other channels).
• Happy to look further if you want to post the subdomain - hopefully I understand correctly.

Hope that helps!

Hi there!

Good question. First of all, it sounds like the 302 is necessary for the functionality of the site. If I'm understanding correctly, a user has the option to add an item on your site to a "compare" cart and if a user does that the page reloads (with the item in the "compare" cart) as a 302. Often times this is done with a parameter.

So it looks something like this?

/example-product/ > 302 > /example-product/?compare=list

If this is the case, I would try taking that parameter and letting Google know not to crawl pages that have it in. You can do this in Google Search Console. Here's a great guide from Google on parameters, exclusions, and what we can do with them.

Please let me know if I misunderstood the question. Hope that helps!

Thanks for the question!

It sounds like you are concerned about Google being able to crawl your site, and you think the

<noscript>tag on every page might be the cause? In your example it looks like if someone tries to access your page with JavaScript disabled they would be redirected to an error page? </p> <p>Anyway you can share your domain so I can better assist?</p> <p>Thanks!</p></noscript>

Hi there,

Others have already mentioned great starting points. The steps I would take here in order would look something like:

1. Confirm that I'm looking at the right data, and identify where the drop is coming from. Is it mostly the blog? A certain section? Top performing pages? Homepage? Or is it more of an all around drop to most pages?
2. Once you answer the first question, it will allow you to prioritize where to look. If you identify most of the drop happened on your blog for example, you can focus your attention there to answer questions like, "Have we changed anything on the blog recently from a technical perspective?", "Are we confident there is nothing that is stopping us from ranking technically?", etc.
3. The more difficult situation is when there is a general decrease in traffic to most pages on the site (doesn't seem to be a rhyme or a reason). In these cases I would look back at what updates have affected the site before to see a trend. When did the drop happen? Does that drop line up with a recent update? If so, what was that update about? Then some form of a technical audit, content audit, etc would be reasonable next steps to essentially identify the biggest issues in each.

Some other points in no particular order

• Remember that more content/pages does not necessarily mean more traffic. Because your formula was working a year ago doesn't mean it will work now (or work as well).
• Looking at your site briefly, you have a good amount of content (~17,000 pages) but it's difficult to navigate and find articles. If I had to guess, I'd say the site could benefit from a re-design and content overhaul/audit to ensure there are not too many overlapping pages and that they are easily discoverable by users (and crawlers).

I know that's a bit of a brain dump but hope that (along with other response) helps point you to a starting point!

This is the right answer minus a few excess characters.

If the blog structure is domain.com/2015/09/title-of-blog then the correct code would be as follows:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^[0-9]+/[0-9]+/(.*)$ blog/$1 [R=301,L]

This will result in: domain.com/blog/title-of-blog.

In other words, Peter you had it right but you just had a few extra characters (you assumed the specific day was also included in the URL structure). Yours would work perfectly if the URL structure was domain.com/2015/09/02/title-of-blog

Also, if anyone ever wants to test your rewrite rules this is a great tool. http://htaccess.mwl.be/.

Also, some more information I can gather from your question:

• that noscript is telling non-js users/bots to meta refresh to an error page
• Google shouldn't be confused by that, but Screaming Frog would (and potentially other search engines)
• it is probably also not the best experience for non-js users: You can display an error messages without redirecting to another URL.

Hope that's helpful...

Hi there,

There's no standard format for online phone numbers although I've seen people recommending to stick with either dashes or periods, and to not use parenthesis.

The more important recommendation would be to make sure users can click to call directly on the phone number, as well as setting up tracking through analytics so you could see how many people called your business through your website.

Hope that helps!

Serge

From my checks, it seems like Google is seeing this (and other content) properly on your homepage.

It looks like the entire website content is loaded in via JavaScript. In other words, if you disable JS in your browser and refresh the page, nothing appears. This is way when you view source you won't see that text. You're absolutely right in checking inspect element!

There are a few ways to check whether GoogleBot is seeing the content you want it to see. GoogleBot will take a "snapshot" (something called the DOM) within 5 seconds of landing on your site. What we want to do is get as close to the DOM as possible.

Here are some ways to check if GoogleBot is seeing your content properly.

1. As Gaston mentioned, you can use Fetch and Render in GSC. I've heard that a better option is to use Google's new Rich Results Tool input URL -> run test -> view source code -> copy HTML and search to see if the content you want Google to see is there. From my understanding the reason is because the new tool spits out the DOM (that snapshot) while GSC will not.

2. You can load the page -> inspect element -> right click on the opening at the top -> copy -> copy outerHTML -> paste into text editor. Then just search for the content you want Google to be seeing.

3. You can use a tool like Screaming Frog and select JavaScript crawling to see what a different crawler can pick up.

4. In this case, since we're just looking for text, we can also just search for the exact text in quotes in Google search.

TL;DR - from my checks, Google is seeing that specific content the way it should. However, since the entire site is loaded in via Javascript it will be vital to continue checking on other elements (like internal links, etc). Hope that helps!