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Hi Ajay,

Great question. First off, I think that both a video sitemap and the correct schema optimizations are extremely important in getting your videos to rank. Personally, I would start off with creating a video sitemap and then branch off into utilizing schema. This is just a matter of preference for me because I like to get the foundational elements done first.

In terms of what tools you can use - I know of a few. If your site is in WordPress the Yoast Video SEO plugin has worked well for me in the past. If not, here are some great posts on Video Sitemaps and the best process for creating them.

https://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/

https://moz.com/blog/video-sitemap-guide-for-vimeo-and-youtube

Hope that helps!

Serge

Hi Brian,

Here are my thoughts around your questions:

1. You mention that the videos aren't tagged or optimized well. If this is a main reason for creating a new channel I would suggest you create a plan for going back and optimizing/tagging all of your current videos instead.

2. Instead of creating an entirely new channel, could you rebrand yours? Change the name, logo, links, etc. but keep the videos, views, shares, etc.

3. In terms of SEO - YouTube takes user signals (views, shares, interactions) into account for ranking videos. I would say if there's anyway you could retain your current YouTube channel, do that. However, if you have to create a new YouTube you can get newer videos ranking fairly well by optimizing them correctly as well as adding them to a video sitemap and utilizing schema.

Hope that helps!

References:

http://searchengineland.com/youtube-ranking-factors-getting-ranked-second-largest-search-engine-225533

Great question.

As recommended by Andrew, I would definitely check your site's robots.txt file to ensure those pages or sections of the site aren't being blocked.

Secondly, I would check your sitemap and make sure there aren't any errors within it. Often times if your sitemap is inaccurate Google might decide to not index certain pages.

Doing a site:search for your website will help you understand what pages are showing up as well. Beyond this, you can do a site:search and enter a keyword for one of the landing pages that isn't being indexed by Google. If that page shows up, you know it's indexed.

Often times GSC doesn't give us 100% accurate data and therefore it's good to do these checks yourself. It's important to note that Google doesn't have to index certain pages if it doesn't find them useful for one reason or another. This is something we don't have much control of, however I doubt that is the case here.

Do the steps I mentioned above and let me know if you find anything interesting. Respond with your findings and we can try and get to the bottom of your specific issue. Hope that helps!

Great question John.

If I'm understanding your question correctly, you want to know how to specifically fix the 404 errors with parameters that are appearing in your GSC account?

Parameters are very useful if used correctly, but I want to make sure I'm understanding your question completely before answering. What exactly are you trying to solve?

Hi there,

First off, I think you made a good call on changing the URL structure and title tags. It sounds like you are seeing positive results from an organic ranking perspective as well as a user experience perspective (this is particularly beneficial because UX plays such a vital role in organic rankings now).

To answer/bring up your specific concerns...

1. How important is the product code to each individual product? If your company is B2B and these product codes are extremely helpful for other businesses I would say it's definitely worth considering. However, if your company sells standard items directly to customers, I think this concern would vary from product-to-product. In other words, if you think there is a substantial amount of users who are searching for the product code, this is something I would consider.

2. In terms of including the brand in the title tag, I would say yes. I don't have much backstory on who your customers are and what you are selling to them, but just based off of this information I would say it would be more beneficial to include the brand name in the title tag. Something like you suggested would work great. "BRAND1 - Product Name - Your company name" would be another way to think about it.

Hope that helps!

Hi John,

First of all - the Google Webmaster Blog has written about infinite content (although not specifically lazy loading) here. Might be worth checking out.

Second, my question to you would be what is your goal with implementing lazy loading on your site? Is it for the site to load faster for users? For overall user experience?

Here is a thread on Reddit talking about this situation, I think /Twoary explains it well. Here's a quote:

"As far as I have experimented with it, it seems like they can indeed not find scroll-based lazy loading (in webmaster tools). Another possibility is onload lazyloading (first load all the content above the fold, then load the content below the fold after the onload event has fired), I have to experiment more with that.

Right now I avoid lazy loading for SEO for articles and such. The fact is that google only cares about "time to first byte". Maybe soonish they will care about "time until above the fold page is loaded". But they do not penalize for the time it takes for all of the resources to be loaded. Apart from that, google mostly cares about user experience which they measure by actual dwell time of their users.

As for the user experience, lazy loading images doesn't add that much benefit either. The browser downloads images near the top of your page first, so the above the fold content isn't downloaded any faster with lazy load. (Possibly even slower because the browser won't be able to start prefetching lazy loaded images until javascript executes.)

The only benefit I see right now is for reducing bandwidth usage (for your site and for mobile users). However the disadvantage will be that your images probably won't rank as well (even if you use pagination/a sitemap.)

OTOH, lazy loading other heavy content such as videos, iframes and ads may be much more beneficial because those actively make the page more sluggish."

Hello Wendy,

Great question. First of all, if done right, something like this can be extremely powerful.

Here are some pros associated with this kind of persona targeting:

1. Increasing conversion rate (more personalized content = more people wanting to convert)

2. Increase in user experience metrics (things like bounce rate, time no site, etc.)

3. IF setup correctly, it could eventually lead to (potentially) less work in the long run for developers, etc.

With that being said, there are some things to watch it for. I wouldn't necessarily call these cons, but nonetheless.

1. Duplicate/thin content can become an issue if strict parameters, etc. aren't setup.

2. There is a possibility that conversion rates don't increase, and therefore you wouldn't be getting any ROI from this.

3. It can take a lot of time to make this system fit into your developers program/work.

It comes down to what the goal is for your website. If you are trying to test and see if (using your example), changing an image for a certain user would benefit the user experience/conversion rates, I would recommend doing some A/B testing first. Tools like Optimizely offer great ways to test out changes to various pages that you control. If a certain test goes well, then you could work with an automation tool to implement that change for specific users.

**TLDR; Can this work? YES. Does it take a lot of resources/thought? YES. Does it vary from business to business? YES. **

Hope that helps.

Good call on the "share bar" and providing some solutions.

Yasser, both Peter and Andy are right here. Search Console will specifically crawl and look for keywords based on the amount of times they are presented on a specific page/on the site. So, if you have multiple social share plugins (such as in your footer as well as within a post) across your entire site, this could lead Google to think you are trying to rank for that term (or at the very least that it's a main focus of the page).

Here's a link explaining how this happens - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35255?hl=en

Hope that helps!

Hi there,

There is definitely a lot that goes into a site migration/redesign, and re-thinking the way your content is presented to the user is definitely one of them. So, before anything else, kudos for spotting that.

In terms of your questions, there is a general rule for UX and IA in terms of organizing content and hierarchy on your site. That rule tends to be to make every important page on your site reachable by a user within three clicks. This is referred to as the "three-click rule". In other words, can a user who lands on the homepage get to the "contact" page within three clicks? How about the "how to apply" page?

I tend to extend this rule to four clicks for specific verticals, and I think it would be appropriate to say that if you can get your user to any page within four clicks of the homepage on your specific site you are doing a great job. Also, Rand did a great Whiteboard Friday on this topic that you might want to check out.

Here are some other thoughts to consider in terms of SEO:

1. Having a long homepage with parallax might look good to some, but the more important thing to ask is "will users be able to find this content efficiently and quickly on all devices?"

2. Site migration can break an entire sites SEO work very quickly. I would do a thorough read of this wonderful guide on migrating sites and make sure you are set on that front.

Hope that is helpful!

Hello Lee,

That's a great question. The links that Peter provided will be helpful in giving you context on this answer. In short, if you had a disavow file uploaded to SC before the migration to https:// all you have to do is make sure the https:// version of your site is validated and submitted to SC, and then re-upload the disavow file to the https:// version.

In other words, you should take the disavow file that was on your http:// SC and upload it to the https:// SC as that is now the correct version of the site.

Hope that helps!

This is the right answer minus a few excess characters.

If the blog structure is domain.com/2015/09/title-of-blog then the correct code would be as follows:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^[0-9]+/[0-9]+/(.*)$ blog/$1 [R=301,L]

This will result in: domain.com/blog/title-of-blog.

In other words, Peter you had it right but you just had a few extra characters (you assumed the specific day was also included in the URL structure). Yours would work perfectly if the URL structure was domain.com/2015/09/02/title-of-blog

Also, if anyone ever wants to test your rewrite rules this is a great tool. http://htaccess.mwl.be/.