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Sounds almost like they'll take all current SEO factors and wipe them - focusing almost purely on links. Eg title tags no longer important.

No, there's no video sitemap. Assume the video can't be removed because of branding stuff.

It's really weird that it's only for this one search term too... Just can't work it out.

Only solution I can come up with is to put the video embed in an i frame. That'd keep everything looking the same to users but it would cost a lot more to implement than a slight tweak in htaccess / GWT / robots.txt. Gah.

Cheers for the response though!

Hey Brevity,

This may or may not be the answer you're looking for but, from my experience, it's the right answer.

Don't think of links in terms of good and bad quality. Whilst there certainly is a difference between a good and a bad link, the first thing you should be looking at is the link profiles of your biggest competitors in the same niche / vertical.

A good way to find these sites is with SEMrush if you don't know them already.

Look at the kind of links your competitors are getting and how the page / domain authority of these links is distributed in their link profile. Eg 90% of their links are on pages with 0-10 page authority, 5% 10-20 page authority 5% over 20.

Now, from my experience, Google doesn't have a model of a "good" link profile, only what's standard in that niche. If everyone else is buying shitty comment spam then you have to do that too. Fight fire with fire. On top of this you optimise the balls off your site and build up more of these high quality links ON TOP of the other links.

I certainly wouldn't just turn off a Linkbuilding method that has already proven it works for your site.

Once this starts getting results slowly wean them off this spam. Think of it like gradually cutting off a smack addict's heroin supply, haha. Obviously comment spam isn't something you want to rely on forever, but its too late now if the ball's already in motion. You just have to slow that baby down first.

Hi Derek, I assume by "bad links" you mean pages on your domain that are returning a 404 error?

If this is the case then there're normally two things I do in these situations.

1. Once I've found the list of 404s I'll look at the page authority of that page in open site explorer (the URL will still show results even if the content is no longer there).

2. If any of these 404 pages are being linked to from EXTERNAL pages then I'll 301 those pages to the most similar other page on the domain.

3. Run Xenu Link Sleuth (it's free, Google it if you don't have it) over the domain and find every link to these 404 pages.

4. Manually go through and remove these dud links.

Hope that helps!

301 redirects should always be used if you delete a page that's built up links from external pages (or if you've merged the content into a larger page).

Hi all,

Got a bit of a weird problem that I can't work out.

I've got a page that contains a video. The SERP for one keyword has the video appearing directly in the search listing like a video rich snippet / schema.

Do not want.

This rich snippet style video result only appears when the page is found for this one keyword, and no other.

How do I stop google displaying the page like this? Why is it only displayed like this for one keyword and no others?

The video is a YouTube video and is embedded in the page. Nothing fancy is going on with the code.

Any ideas? I'm stumped.

Hi Derek, I assume by "bad links" you mean pages on your domain that are returning a 404 error?

If this is the case then there're normally two things I do in these situations.

1. Once I've found the list of 404s I'll look at the page authority of that page in open site explorer (the URL will still show results even if the content is no longer there).

2. If any of these 404 pages are being linked to from EXTERNAL pages then I'll 301 those pages to the most similar other page on the domain.

3. Run Xenu Link Sleuth (it's free, Google it if you don't have it) over the domain and find every link to these 404 pages.

4. Manually go through and remove these dud links.

Hope that helps!

301 redirects should always be used if you delete a page that's built up links from external pages (or if you've merged the content into a larger page).