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Thanks, that's exactly the kind of clarification I was looking for.

This is a pretty basic question, but I'm wondering if there is any meaningful difference between the terms Organic and Natural traffic? My assumption is that Organic traffic refers to traffic that comes in through search engines, whereas Natural traffic would also include people directly entering a URL, coming in through social referrals, and through links on other sites in addition to organic search. Is this correct, or are there other definitions for what these terms mean?

Yeah, we had suspected that just having too many keywords that are too similar could be causing confusion for search engines, but it's good to have a third party affirmation to support that assessment. We do intend to rework and "un" optimize some of our pages that are competing with one another and see what happens. Thanks for the assistance and for sharing that blog article too.

Thanks for the response and linking to that article, some helpful tips there.

We're experiencing an issue where we have keywords directing traffic to incorrect child landing pages. For a generic example using fake product types, a keyword search for XL Widgets might send traffic to a child landing page for Commercial Widgets instead.

In some cases, the keyword phrase might point a page for a child landing page for a completely different type of product (ex: a search for XL Widgets might direct traffic to XL Gadgets instead).

It's tough to figure out exactly why this might be happening, since each page is clearly optimized for its respective keyword phrase (an XL Widgets page, a Commercial Widgets page, an XL Gadgets page, etc), yet one page ends up ranking for another page’s keyword, while the desired page is pushed out of the SERPs.

We're also running into an issue where one keyword phrase is pointing traffic to three different child landing pages where none of the ranking pages are the page we've optimized for that keyword phrase, or the desired page we want to rank appears lower in the SERPs than the other two pages (ex: a search for XL Widgets shows XL Gadgets on the first SERP, Commercial Widgets on the second SERP, and then finally XL Widgets down on the third or fourth SERP).

We suspect this may be happening because we have too many child landing pages that are targeting keyword terms that are too similar, which might be confusing the search engines. Can anyone offer some insight into why this may be happening, and what we could potentially do to help get the right pages ranking how we'd like?

Thanks for the quick answer. That would support Michael's second point up above as well.

That is a good question, but the reason is because we might have several different products in one category and we want visitors searching for a generic product type to see our entire selection of that type of product, rather than just one. For example, Widgets might be a category page with 10 different widgets on it, but Awesome XL Blue Widgets might be a specific product. If someone just searches "widgets," then we want them directed to our widgets page, whereas if someone searched for a specific product name, we'd want them going to the Awesome Company XL Blue Widgets page, or another specific product they might search for.

That is definitely helpful though, thanks!

Hi,

We are noticing an issue where some product pages are outranking our relevant category pages for certain keywords. For a made up example, a "heavy duty widgets" product page might rank for the keyword phrase Heavy Duty Widgets, instead of our Heavy Duty Widgets category page appearing in the SERPs.

We've noticed this happening primarily in cases where the name of the product page contains an at least partial match for the desired keyword phrase we want the category page to rank for. However, we've also found isolated cases where the specified keyword points to a completely irrelevent pages instead of the relevant category page.

Has anyone encountered a similar issue before, or have any ideas as to what may cause this to happen? Let me know if more clarification of the question is needed.

Thanks!

Thank you SEO Moz! We are trying a Wistia hosting test for the next few months. Thanks for suggesting that and for all the great advice.

This is really two questions in one.

1. If we put a video on YouTube and on our site via Wistia, how would that affect our rankings/authority/credibility? Would we get punished for duplicate video content?

2. If we put a Wistia hosted video on our website twice, on two different pages, we would get hit for having duplicate content?

Any other suggestions regarding hosting on Wistia and YouTube versus just Wistia for product videos would be much appreciated. Thank you!

Our site provides two approaches for customers to locate the products they're looking for: Brand and Category.

Where we're unsure if we're causing confusion for the search engines is when the left navigation filter link anchor text for these pages conflict with one another.

For example, let's say we have a Snazzy Brand Type A widget, Blue, Squared.

The nav links from a category approach could be:

Widgets > Blue > Squared > Snazzy

From the brand approach, we have:

Snazzy > Widgets > Blue > Squared

Where we have the conflict is in the instances of "Snazzy". From a category perspective, we direct customers down to the Snazzy Widgets page at /snazzy-widgets/ (as it's a filter). But from a brand perspective, we direct to the Snazzy brand page at /snazzy/. This means we have two sets of links with the anchor text of "Snazzy" that are going to two completely different pages.

Repeat this across a variety of categories, and you have many instances of "Snazzy" all pointing to different Snazzy-related pages, but not to the Snazzy brand page (/snazzy/, /snazzy-widgets/, /snazzy-whatsits/, etc).

So what's the best way to make sure we communicate the right information to the search engines, while still keeping the customer's browsing experience intact and enjoyable?

Thanks!

This is really two questions in one.

1. If we put a video on YouTube and on our site via Wistia, how would that affect our rankings/authority/credibility? Would we get punished for duplicate video content?

2. If we put a Wistia hosted video on our website twice, on two different pages, we would get hit for having duplicate content?

Any other suggestions regarding hosting on Wistia and YouTube versus just Wistia for product videos would be much appreciated. Thank you!

Yeah, we had suspected that just having too many keywords that are too similar could be causing confusion for search engines, but it's good to have a third party affirmation to support that assessment. We do intend to rework and "un" optimize some of our pages that are competing with one another and see what happens. Thanks for the assistance and for sharing that blog article too.