I have evidence that product videos are hurting our rankings - How do I hide them!?
-
We normally rank between #1-3 for long-tail product related keywords in our industry.
Then we saw our rankings drop when we added product videos to some of our product pages.
My hypothesis was that for most ecommerce-related queries, Google has a certain aesthetic that they are going for in the SERP's. They like to show video listings somewhere in the middle of the first page.. not as one of the first 3 results.
- Product page
- Product page
- Google shopping results
- Product page
- Video Result on product page
- Video Result on product page
- Product page
I did an experiment by removing the product videos from a selection of our product pages and as soon as they were reindexed w/o the video we saw an average of a 3 spot jump in rankings!
Since the product videos have actually helped on-site conversion rate.. we'd like to keep them on the product pages but hide them from being indexed by Google.
Is there a safe way to do this? Is it possible to use an i-frame, or will Google still see the video on the page and index it as such.
Thanks for any advice!
-
Hi Charlie,
so - first of all, are you actually losing any traffic as a result of lower rankings? More often than not, while video results may appear lower down in the page to fit in with an aesthetic model - they get a higher click through rate. If you are retaining or increasing overall traffic for those keywords in-spite of lower rankings, then you are actually in a better position than you were before.
The reason for wanting to get higher up in the SERPs is to get more traffic, but if you can get high click through's in 5th with a video than in 1st without - then 5th position is more beneficial. This feels counter-intuitive, but with the expansion of rich snippets and personalised search - we need to start thinking much wider than just rankings. Rankings are only as good as the traffic they provide.
If you are desperate to lose the video rich snippets (which feels like it would be a step backwards), then you could try one of a few things:
- As you mention, use an Iframe to embed. Google probably wont index it (though it's not unheard of!)
- Hide the video with CSS and then have it appear in a lightbox player with a JS trigger.
- Put the video on a separate page and aim to get two results for the same term (one video and one non-video). NB - this is basically self cannibalisation and could backfire, so I wouldn't recommend it, but it might be worth a try.
Google are doing a lot of tests at the moment and are shifting things around in the SERPs based on rich snippets and content type as much as "relevancy". The model of "higher up = better" doesn't really apply any more and so, in your position i would be inclined to hold tight and see where things go in the next few months. If you're getting product video rich snippets, you're probably in a good position and building more links to the pages may help them to appear higher up and with the rich snippets. Its really not clear how things will end up looking in the not too distant future and I would advise against taking a short term strategy to increase rankings if you're not actually losing a significant amount of traffic.
Hope that's helpful,
Phil
-
I would try a little experiment and try hosting a video on youtube and linking to it. I have seen videos on youtube in the past get a preference and it may work for you instead of self hosting.
Even if it's against your business model to use youtube, the experiment would be wonderful for the community to see if your listings would be affected with a self hosted or YT hosted video
-
We created the videos ourselves and are self-hosting.
All videos have a unique title
-
are the videos identical to other videos that are being used by other people?
Did you give them a unique title?
Do you have the videos on youtube?
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can I rank without links
Let's say I have great content. I have a great website design (easy to navigate for user) that answers their questions but I have no links. Can I still rank on on a keyword that has a difficulty score of 24. I imagine that I can that google can't penalise me for not having links. Does it mean that without links it will take longer to rank than with links but that google with rank me at some point ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Length for ranking, is it keyword dependant ?
Is the time it takes to rank keyword dependant ? in other word does it take more time for a page to rank on a keyword that has 5000 request a month than for a page to rank on a keyword that has 50 requests a month ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
How to reverse declining Google rankings?
We have a long established business since 2004 and have been fortunate that having been one of the original companies in our industry, we have always enjoyed strong Google rankings. Unfortunately, these have been steadily declining over the past couple of years and a comparison of August to date against the equivalent period last year has seen a 20% drop in traffic from Google. We don't believe that it is being caused by a penalty and rather is the result of some strong players entering our market and tightening their focus which has caused us to take a dip in rankings. We are guilty of being complacent in our SEO - largely due to not knowing what to do and being scared to touch it when it was working in case we broke it! - but now it's time to fight back. We still have a strong site, good traffic levels and a strong product offering. We have knowledge of SEO and resources in house, but are not experts by any means. Our current plan is to: perform a technical site audit, fixing the issues highlighted by the Moz Pro Software put strong emphasis on our blog, writing daily about the latest news and events in our industry provide weekly content articles which are more in depth than the daily blog articles and which will be of interest to our community undertake surveys and publish infographics and statistics with the hope of being picked up in national newspapers Are there any key elements that we are missing out in this plan, or is that it in a nutshell? Any help and advice is greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
Meta Keywords: Do They Hurt Rankings
I know that Google doesn't use meta keywords, but does it hurt to have anything in there? Just wondering if I need to remove all the meta keywords that are on my site, or are they harmless to have. Also, would meta keywords ever be used by an internal search plug-in if we were to install one in the future, or do they generally look at the product title and description for that info?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b4cab0 -
Help - Lost Ranking - What did I screw up?!
Hi, We're working with a local service provider with a location specific keyword (not a real example: "orlando plumbing contractors"). Background:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AaronHenry
In recent history the client updated a new site design and upgraded from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5. Of course there were duplicate content issues which have been resolved with the help of AceSEF. Duplicate content, title tags, and other content issues are handled as soon as they appear in GWT or MOZ. Additionally, a high number of backlinks were lost when the latest Google update hit. Many of these sites were of sites that no longer existed or were spammy and flushed out. Some were lost due to the previous SEO firm literally removing backlinks and switching them to their new client (seo firm was putting all of the work the client paid for under their name to control everything). Current Situation: The backlink loss seems to have been stopped (hopefully) because we are using a new strategy that relies solely on the quality of the links, surrounding text, varied anchor text, relevancy, etc.) However, we tried an experiment on just one of the clients keywords. That experiment seems to have blown up in our faces evidently. The landing page for the location specific keyword has dropped from the index completely (it seems), but only when searching broad. When using exact match with quotes like the example quoted above ("orlando plumbing contractors") the landing page appears, but several ranks lower. We were ranked yesterday 6/23/13, but as of today 6/24/13 are no longer ranked. On broad matches, non-relevant sites and even a site that shows only a broken server configuration is outranking the client (they appear for the broad search, but the client does not). What Was Done
We recently created a press release for and posted it on a press release site. We then created a link back to the landing page (exact match anchor text). We posted the PR article to several social sites (Google plus, folkd, delicious, twitter, stumble upon, diigo). We also created a blog article (on-site) on site for that, creating links back to the landing page (the links all had exact anchor text). We posted that blog article to social news sites (facebook, stumble, delicious) and included a ping. The PR article was manually rewritten and posted to the PR site (we had to make 2 versions of the PR; one for the blog and one for the PR site). The Result
The client ending up dropping off the broad search rankings, but only slipped a few for "exact match" (with quotes). The PR article that was created is now ranked on page 3 for the board keyword and is still beat by non working sites. We suspect that the exact anchor text could be causing this problem. Anyone else have an idea (we're scratching our heads and trying not to freak out at the same time).0 -
Loosing Ranking
Hi, I'm working on a real estate website last 2 years. I've get top position on local and organic search result. But last 2 month I'm loosing ranking on some keywords on both local and organic search. I'm doing boomarking, guest posting related to real estate and social media promotion but getting no result that's way I'm looking seo person for my website. Thanks and waiting for your feedback
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KLLC0 -
Local ranking (keyword) strategies
Hello SEOmozers, I've been working on improving all components of my SEO skills for the past 6 months. I have definitely had some great victories and some gray defeats. My newest challenge is local ranking for a home improvement company. My target is to rank them locally with Google within the top 7 results. I have managed to do so, but only for one keyword "windows and doors CITY". My campaign, in terms of anchor text has a wide variety of long and shortail keywords, I have not concentrated on the above keyword. My question is, how do I go about to rank this website in the local results for all other keywords "windows CITY", "window replacement CITY", etc... What I don't understand is how Google picks up which keywords to rank the website locally for, and which ones to ignore. Any information will be well received. Cheers, Nikster
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thenikster0 -
Google Places - How do we rank
So, google places showing up on search results is great feature . . . But how can we get our results to the top? I mean I can see some terrible websites appearing at the top of the google places with their places page having no activity whatsoever. Is there a trick to this at all? What can we do to increase our ranking on Google Places because our old GOOD rankings are now appearing BELOW the map results Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kayweb0