Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Donnie. I watched an read both of these, which were quite good, but still, neither one addressed where is best to post the video transcript. I noticed that SEOMoz actually puts the entire video transcript right on their page. However, for us, posting an entire transcript on a product page just isn't probably the best idea, particuarly for long videos.

I did surmise that using the <iframe>transcript that DotSub.com provides is fairly useless because Google won't crawl the iframe, consequently not crawling the transcript.</p> <p>Ideally, it would be great to include an interactive transcript on the page via a scrolling text box so it doesn't dominate the entire product page. Has anyone done or tried this?</p> <p>*Update - As I was poking around and reading Donnie's recommendations, which were excellent I also found Sean Lind's tool that will automatically build YouTube embed code that contains a link back to your site (instead of YouTube). It was so cool I thought I'd better include it here: <a href="http://www.seanlind.com/poker-blog/geek/youtube-video-backlink-embedding-tool/">http://www.seanlind.com/poker-blog/geek/youtube-video-backlink-embedding-tool/</a></p> <p>I still haven't got any specific recommendations on where is the best place to post a trascript on a product page....all suggestions welcome!</p></iframe>

I just posted a question as a comment on this blog post (http://www.audiotranscription.org/6-reasons-you-need-to-have-your-sites-videos-transcribed/comment-page-1/#comment-4311) and realized I probably should have asked the question here because it is really SEO-related.

We are in the process of transcribing all of our videos. Can you someone recommend how best to post the transcript file on our product pages? For example, here's a product page that has a video review on it: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/behringer-x32-digital-mixing-system.  Would it be best to  post a link to the transcript file or insert the iframe transcript file from DotSub.com (in that case wouldn't DotSub.com be getting credit for our original content?) or, should we just let our captions on the YouTube stream from there (which is what's happening right now)? Will Google still crawl the transcript if the only place it's available is on YouTube? If so, doesn't YouTube get credited for that content, and not our site?  Even if we do post a trascript on the page, if it appeared at YouTube first, wouldn't YouTube get credit for the original version?

We want credit for that content...just not sure how to get it?

I understand that moving to Wistia.com would probably solve most of these issues. What I'm trying to figure out is how best to handle new transcripts for existing videos over at YouTube?

Yes Greg, absolutely agreed. Linking to a page that has a 404 is a wasted linking opportunity. Not good for spiders or humans. Cesar, for your own reference, there is a great Chrome extension that crawls pages and identifies 404s. It's quite handy. Here's the info http://www.seomoz.org/blog/check-my-links-chrome-extension-a-link-builders-dream

This is a great question. I am a lot like you, except I don't get stuck on certain things that revolve around Google Webmaster Tools. Here's my advice:

1. 404's are GOOD - OK, everyone gets 404s. I work for a large e-commerce site. We have 404s everywhere. The answer? Create a custom 404 page that is consistentwith your overall branding that, in a friendly way, leads people somewhere useful.

2. Do you have a dynamic site? Then technical HTML errors abound I am sure. Learn to know which ones are ccsting you link juice (use SEOMoz's Open Site Explorer to identify duplicate content)/ Bend over backwards to resolve your duplicate content issues.

3. Depending on your platform, take duplicate meta descriptions and duplicate title tags with a grain of salt.

I have one store on the 3dcart platform right now. On this platform, it's impossible to customize meta titles and meta descriptions for .asp pages. You have no choice but to ignore errors coming from .asp pages from sites on that platform. [Never mind the fact that they are trying to sell you SEO services]

Be patient, keep studying, keep working and you'll deliver the best results possible for you client.

Hi Devinder,

Definitely 100% get rid of that Meta refresh. I am just now dealing with this exact same problem on a large site for which I do in-house SEO. Try this, put the URL http://agaalpet.com into Open Site Exporer and compare it to http://akaalpet.com/default.aspx

Thanks very much to Jenn Lopes at SEOMoz I was able to articulate to management why this was bad and worth spending (in our case) $1,000 to have it fixed.

You are fragmenting the authority of what is probably your most authoritative page by having the meta refresh. It's definitely not OK in Google's eyes because people used to use it for nefarious purposes [SPAM]. Here's a screenshot. See how it's fragmenting your links? Oh heay, one other important thing is that your most authoritative page, http://www.akaalpet.com isn't passing any of it's link juice down to your other pages. The meta refresh is causing that too. Hope that helps!

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Great response and I agree with Big. Large e-commerce sites with thousands of SKUs that often only have tiny difference from one product to the next are bound to have many similar product descriptions. Yes, Amazon is a perfect example. Google is smart enoug to know if what you are doing with your two sites is "an attempt to get 2 bites of the cherry." It's pretty clear that you are trying to serve the most appropriate content to the most appropriate audience. Content management would be easier with everything all on one site, but with the history of these sites, it's probably best to keep them as they are. INow, if you had two domains in either the US or UK that had all the same identical product pages, that would be an issue.

Our site has over 100 great videos. We are currently streaming them all from our YouTube channel. I noticed  SEOMoz is using http://www.wistia.com and that when I copy and paste a video from SEOMoz that code has a link back to the SEOMoz site in it, which of course is awesome for SEO.

My question has several parts:

Is this possible to do with an embed code from YouTube?

Specifically directed towards SEOMoz: Which of the 3 types of player did you choose, HTML5, Flash or javascript? Why?

Is Wistia just creating a video feed, or are they actually hosting your video content too?

Our goal is two-fold: 1. We want people who embed our videos to be also embeddding a link back to our site and 2. We want our videos to be found in SERPs and have those direct people to our site instead of our YouTUbe channel.

I'd welcome any comments regarding video SEO in this thread. Thanks!

How old is your site? Is it an e-commerce site? How many URLs? Have you always had the same domain name? The reason I ask these questions is because I am seeing the same thing on our site. We have many technical issues probably contributing to this. Some of them might be the same if we have similar sites.

Thanks Prasad for all your help. And thank you to Ersin also. We have solved the problem. Apparently, our URL re-write at the TomCat level was taking precedence over the .htaccess file. Once our IT director added the appropriate redirect for these domain pages into the URL re-write file, the problem was fixed and those pages now render with a 301-redirect to the correct page one the correct domain. I have encouraged him to write a blog post about this and put it here because there was very little documentation online about TomCat redirects tasking precedence over an .htaccess file.

Thanks Prasad,

We tried your suggestion because there was a lot of stuff [1220 lines of code] in our .htaccess file. We stripped everything out except your code, and still had the same problem. Our IT director is wondering if perhaps there is a conflict between the .htaccess file that operates at the Apache level and the URL rewirte file which operates at the TomCat level. He is wondering, does one of them take precedence over the other? In other words, could our URL re-write file be causing the redirects in the .htaccess file to not work properly?

I am thinking maybe we need to hire someone to look at the code in both files in order to figure out where and why we are having a conflict?

Dana

Thanks to both Ersin and Prasad. I appreciate your efforts to help very much. My IT director tried both versions of code without success. Here is exactly what he wrote:

" I tried the suggestions without success. I even moved the ccisound
redirects to the top of the file thinking that some other redirect was grabbing
it first, But no go, same results. Top level redirected, lower level not."

Any suggestions as to why neither code succeeded at creating a "catch all." ?

Thanks Ersin,

Can you explain how your coding suggestion is different from Prasad's? I am not a coder so am just wondering if there's a different methodology behind the two suggestions?

Yes, a catch-all makes sense to me. what is the difference between your code suggestion and the one just below posted by Ersin A. ? Also, just for our own understanding, can you explain why the code we were using wasn't accomplishing what we wanted? (I just want to be able to explain it to our Web team). Thanks!

We have several old domains. One is http://www.ccisound.com  - Our "real" site is http://www.ccisolutions.com  The 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain works. However, the 301-redirects for interior pages, like:

http://www.ccisolund.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators  do not work. This URL should redirect to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators  but as you can see it does not.

Our IT director supplied me with this code from the HT Access file in hopes that someone can help point us in the right direction and suggest how we might fix the problem:

RewriteCond%{HTTP_HOST} ccisound.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule^(.*)$ http://www.ccisolutions.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Any ideas on why the 301 redirect isn't happening? Thanks all!

Thanks Donnie. This answers part of my question. But I am still wondering about three different product pages being diverted somehow to this odd version of the homepage. How could this be accomplished from a technical standpoint without doing a 301-redirect?

It looks like a potential competitor already owns: miamiwaterfront.com

However: waterfrontmiami.com is available. 6,600 local monthly searches, but only medium competition. I would buy it.

I am seeing “Duplicate Page Content” coming up in our
reports on SEOMOZ.org

Here’s an example:

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/williams-sound-ppa-r35-e

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/aphex-230-master-voice-channel-processor

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/AT-AE4100.prod

These three pages are for completely unrelated products.
They are returning “200” status codes, but are being identified as having
duplicate page content. It appears these are all going to the home page, but it’s
an odd version of the home page because there’s no title. I would understand if these pages 301-redirected to the home page if they were obsolete products, but it's not a 301-redirect. The referring page is
listed as: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators

None of the 3 links in question appear anywhere on that page. It's puzzling. We have 132 of these. Can anyone help me figure out
why this is happening and how best to fix it?  Thanks!

I would recommend reformatting the Urls for  pages that have lost rankings. Then, just choose a few of the pages that retained their rank to try hyphens instead of + sign. Track them. If they improve, then do the rest of them. If they decline, remove the 301 redirects and return them to what they were and leave the rest of them as is.

Dana

Hi Greg,

I have a follow up question. Because these pages are being dynamically generated from the base URL, the only place to put the meta no index tag would be on the parent URL, which of course we don't want to do because it needs to be indexed. Can we add these individual URLs [just the ones with origin codes]  to the robots.txt file?

Dana

Thanks very much to you both. This is super helpful!