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This is an interesting question for me. We have been doing video for a while and do it like you, hosted on YouTube. I have never really considered a video sitemap, because I always assumed that YouTube will outrank us for any given video of ours (the typical situation if you have your content on a much more powerful website). And that is what I do see on video search.We do get some organic traffic to our gallery-type page, though. For now, I will probably keep things the way they are, since we get a good amount of traffic from YouTube and that is the main point, but I would like to hear if anyone has had video sitemaps boost traffic to their own site.

Is there a reason to have the extra subfolder, like a category page with useful content or an extra grouping to help navigate a large amount of content? Then yes, that is a good idea. I wouldn't add an extra level for the sake of extra keywords.

For the first question, Google has become pretty sophisticated in making connections, so ranking for a keyword similar to one you are optimizing for isn't unusual, especially a low search volume keyword that might not have much competition.

For the second question, it's hard to say without knowing the site, but did you do the site search that way, with the www? Is your homepage www or non www?

In my experience, yes, you can regain value.

I redirected an old microsite with external links (which had been abandoned a few years prior) to the relevant page on my current, active site and that page quickly grew to become one of the strongest pages.

[There had been a thread on this here in Moz if you want to read more.]

If you are adding value to the category pages and making them useful places for the user to land and not just a list of links, then by all means, you should keep them indexed. And yes, in this case you still need for each page to have a canonical URL, so you will have to pick which category a recipe best fits in. (You can still have the link on two category pages, one of them just needs to be the canonical.)

Yes, you will have to wait a bit to see if that changes anything. But in the meantime, take a look at the source code of one of the pages that is reporting a zero bounce rate and see if the Analytics code is on the page twice. (Here is an article on bounce rates that has additional information, if that is not the answer.)

Going back a step, have you linked your Adwords and Analytics accounts? Here's how.

Is your Analytics code present twice on the page? That could do it. And in Google Analytics, the medium for Adwords would be "cpc" or if you look in channels, it is "paid search".

If you set up a ppc campaign for something you'd like to rank for organically, you can get information you could not get from Google otherwise, such as what searches are bringing up your ad, which can help your organic efforts going forward. It is also a way to get people to see your information when they may not have been able to find it organically yet. It sounds like you have the money available to test this, so try it and see what results you get.

I didn't mean to scare you off--when I did your searches, I saw ads, so my intention was for you to look deeper, because people are spending money there.

Who is advertising? Are they reputable in the field? What are they advertising? Is this related to what you might be selling? I don't know the niche, so I don't have those answers.

What specific items will you be selling? Or if it is something too specific, what would the next more general category be? I would look into those search terms.

The keyword shamanism itself gets a lot of search, but it is broad and conceptual and probably would not by itself be your number one money word, though you would want to have some authority for it.

I also wouldn't entirely base my decision on Adwords (unless your decision is about advertising there), that's just a starting point--a rule of thumb to gauge interest. Paid search is different from organic search.

ps- Yes, the remarketing/behavioral component can be big, if you are planning to spend money in addition to your organic efforts. Good Luck!

As a general rule, if money is being made, ads are being bought. A search with no ads = don't try this at home. A search with ads = look deeper. [One of the sites I manage is a contrarian blog.]

For me, a good rule of thumb for this type of question is to search with the term and see if ads for products come up. If so, there are people spending money on the  niche. I then look in Google Adwords to get search volume and see how much people are paying.

You can use Majestic for free for sites you own. [You will have to verify your site.] Very useful!

What I have done in a similar situation is to make the vanity URL the preferred URL. I created the vanity URL as an alias of the landing page URL and used a canonical to indicate that the vanity URL is the one to index.

fabric-fabric, I see you have asked this question in a couple of threads. The best way to let people see your question so they can help you is to post it in its own thread. To do this, look under "Have a Question?" in the right column and click on "Ask". You will be brought to a page where you can enter your question.

Often a homepage ranks better than internal pages for the reason you suggest, more links (and probably other things). And yes, internal linking can help.

Does it make sense to link to one of your internal pages from your home page? You are talking about the blue widgets, so you link to the blue-widget page?

If you are worried about tanking all of your ranking, pick just one of the keywords you think is being cannibalized and try working on only that one at first.

Yes, title tags are more important from an SEO perspective, but the real goal is to get people to do what the website is set up for, which in your case is rentals.

Rental pages by their nature are not evergreen (hopefully!), so getting interested buyers to click on a listing is more important than getting a page to rank well.

You do need to rank well enough so that people will see your results (so, first page, anyway) but I know that seeing square footage and pricing information right up front would certainly make me click on that result, even if it were lower on the page.

You could try splitting your listings and doing half with these details and half with descriptive keyword terms, and see what you get.

Have you ever been able to see a non-all F report from Moz? If so, I would see what has changed since then. But yes, your developers should be able to give you the answers you are looking for.

If you have a very small blog, with a limited number of posts on a narrow topic range, this perhaps doesn't apply.

If you are bigger than that and cover a range of topics, a multilevel structure keeps things organized, for you, your readers, and for search engines.

You can also take advantage of internal linking, organizing sub-topics under topics both so that readers can find related articles that might interest them and so that search engines can see how your posts are related, and what concepts are relevant. [A post titled "Shingles" would mean one thing under health-news, and another under building-materials.]

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