Questions created by SharieBags
-
How Do You Remove Video Thumbnails From Google Search Result Pages?
This is going to be a long question, but, in a nutshell, I am asking if anyone knows how to remove video thumbnails from Google's search result pages? We have had video thumbnails show up next to many of our organic listings in Google's search result pages for several months. To be clear, these are organic listings for our site, not results from performing a video search. When you click on the thumbnail or our listing title, you go to the same page on our site - a list of products or the product page. Although it was initially believed that these thumbnails drew the eye to our listings and that we would receive more traffic, we are actually seeing severe year over year declines in traffic to our category pages with thumbnails vs. category pages without thumbnails (where average rank remained relatively constant). We believe this decline is due to several things: An old date stamp that makes our listing look outdated (despite the fact that we can prove Google has spidered and updated their cache of these pages as recent as 2 days ago). We have no idea where Google is getting this datestamp from. An unrelated thumbnail to the page title, etc. - sometimes a picture of a man's face when the category is for women's handbags A difference in intent - user intends to shop or browse, not watch a video. They skip our listing because it looks like a video even though both the thumbnail and our listing click through to a category page of products. So we want to remove these video thumbnails from Google's search results without removing our pages from the index. Does anyone know how to do this? We believed that this connection between category page and video was happening in our video sitemap. We have removed all reference to video and category pages in the sitemap. After making this change and resubmitting the sitemap in Webmaster Tools, we have not seen any changes in the search results (it's been over 2 weeks). I've been reading and it appears many believe that Google can identify video embedded in pages. That makes sense. We can certainly remove videos from our category pages to truly remove the connection between category page URL and video thumbnail. However, I don't believe this is enough because in some cases you can find video thumbnails next to listings where the page has not had a video thumbnail in months (example: search for "leather handbags" and find www.ebags.com/category/handbags/m/leather - that video does not exist on that page and has not for months. Similarly, do a search for "handbags" and find www.ebags.com/department/handbags. That video has not been on that page since 2010. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharieBags0 -
Header Links vs. In Page Links
We have lost considerable rank for some of our top search terms (department names) and the rank loss correlates to a change we made on our homepage. That change was to remove a secondary navigation to the major departments in the content of our homepage. Now all we have is the global header navigation on the homepage (and all other pages on the site). I have read that in-page links pass more value than sitewide header links and I'm wondering if this is really true. These were text links (not linked images) and our header also contains text links (and some javascript). We did not make any other changes on our site at this time and this was not around the time of any major algorithm updates. The site is www.ebags.com.
On-Page Optimization | | SharieBags1 -
Confirmation Needed: Do any search engine crawlers accept cookies?
I'm looking for confirmation here. Do any search engine crawlers accept cookies? I thought that the answer was always no, but we're looking in our weblogs and seeing some odd behavior.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharieBags0 -
SEOMoz Pro still hasn't crawled 10k pages for one campaign
I looked for a question in the forum already for this but couldn't find anything. Perhaps I am using the wrong keywords, so I apologize if this is a duplicate. I recently signed up with SEOMoz Pro and added two campaigns. For one campaign, 10,000 pages were crawled. For the other campaign, only about 300. It's been 2 weeks since I created the campaigns. Is there a way to force a crawl of the site associated with the second campaign?
Moz Pro | | SharieBags0