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Hi there,

We were ranking no. 1 for one of our key terms for a long time, however a competitor of ours by the looks of it purchased a load of private blog network links and managed to shift above us.

The page we rank for on that term has a video with the markup to trigger a video box rich snippet (which i've noticed never seems to be given on position 1 but can be for 2 and below) - so that is now what our entry in the SERPs is.

Since then we have actually dropped down to 3rd, with the web page now being in 2nd not having any new links / content in a very long time.

Therefore I was wondering if anyone had any ideas about whether the video box could actually reduce CTR which could have resulted in us dropping down to 3rd ? The meta description text seems to be reduced to 100 characters with the vid box, so we're not getting our full message across where the others in the results are.

My natural assumption would be that the video box would gain a higher CTR, but i'm thinking this may not be the case for us. Does anyone know of any data relating to the video box in the SERPS ?

Many thanks,

Stuart

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Hi everyone,

The background to my question is that one of the companies I work for has just produced a load of videos answering many of the common questions about their products, for the ecommerce part of their site. I've got these videos transcribed which I want to use as the backbone to some of the main pages on the site (some of which are already ranking reasonably well).

I was thinking of putting this content on their department page (so for example their departments would be kitesurfing, land kites, toy kites etc.) above links to their sections (e.g. kite surf kites, kite surf boards etc.). Do you think this would be a good place to put a large amount of text ? (the text will be in a scrollable div) - i.e. could it get in the way of the links which are currently passing juice deeper in to the site ?

Alternatives are to put the videos under the links to the sections (which would place them below the fold), or to place each video on its own page and simply link to these pages from the departments page (although it is the department page we wish to rank).

Another alternative is to put links to the sections both before and after the new content.

Hope that all makes sense! Thanks in advance

Hi thanks for the input, my only concern with doing this would be increasing load times, I think its a case of one optimisation tactic vs. another. Perhaps something like only loading the product images of the products below the fold would help the loading time issue but this then creates issues of its own!

Hi there,

Whilst checking out the SERPS, as you do, I noticed that where our category page appears, google now seems to be counting the number of products (what it calls items) on the product page and displaying this in the 1st part of the description (see image attached).

My problem is we employ pagination, so that our category page will have 15 items on it, then there are paginated results for the rest, with either ?page=2 or page-2/ etc. appended to the URL. Although this is only a minor issue, I was just wondering if there was a way to change the number of products displayed on that page to be the entire number of products in that category, is there a microformat markup or something that can over-ride what google has detected ?

Furthermore is this system of pagination effective ? I have considered using javascript pagination, such that all products would be loaded on to the one page but hidden until 'paginated', but I was worried about having hidden elements on the page, and also the impact of load times. Although I think this may solve the problem and display the true number of products in a section!

Any help much appreciated,

Stuart

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Thanks for the advice, that article looks great will have a good read of it over the weekend. I think it might just be down to a case of trying various things on a few different pages and see which works best.

I agree authority is key here, however we found having a clear site navigation near the top of the page, as well as including breadcrumbs on deeper pages helped give google the clues about which pages to show when you are deemed worthy!

Thanks for the response, I should have mentioned "Liberty Games" is our brand term so is at the and after the | of every page on the site.

I did read that it was a good idea to try and target the singular and the plural term in the title tage, so for example 'Pool Tables, buy a pool table online at Liberty Games' - although i'm not sure if this would appear too stuffed as when you search for the singular google already highlights the plural so it clearly knows the link. That said we don't rank as well on the singular so any boost would help.

Hi everyone,

Thanks to what seems to be a recent(ish) algo change in Google, some of our more targeted deeper pages are ranking for search terms where before only our homepage would rank.

This is of course great however I am a little worried that some of the page titles of our internal pages are a little short, for example our main departments (we are an ecommerce store) are titles 'Department Name | Liberty Games' so for example 'Pool Tables | Liberty Games'.

I have heard varying reports on what to do with the title tag, I have heard to keep the most relevant keywords to the left of the tag, which we have done, I have also heard that shorter is better.

I am just a bit concerned that our tags are looking a little stumpy in the serps alongside other results which are longer (although admittedly a bit keyword stuffed).

So (eventually) my question is, will short titles harm my click-through rate ? but are shorter titles better for SEO ? If longer is better are there any recommendations about what I could add to these titles that could potentially help click-throughs and natural rankings ?

Many thanks,

Stuart