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I second this! Thanks for the recommendations, Dan

-Trung

I'd recommend going with option #1. The pages already have some history and, also, has some crawlable text content that would support the video. You may want to add a video transcription to provide additional context and crawlable text for search engines. Also remember to mark the videos accordingly (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2413309?hl=en) and to create and submit a valid video XML sitemap to the respective search engines.

As for the video landing page, I think it's fine if it useful to users- which I think it is. It should not present duplicate content issues if it is just a video thumbnail and short description. If you're really concerned though, you could always add unique content to the video landing page. What page copy might be useful to users who are landing on the page for the first time from a search result? How would you describe to the user what the group of videos are and what type of videos they might find? This could all be useful to users and also help to differentiate the page.

Hi Josh,

After inputting the URL you're researching, you can just click the blue "Export to CSV" link right below the dropdown filters on the "Inbound Links" tab (which is the default view after you search). A few quick tips:

• If you're looking to see only the external inbound links, which I suspect is the case here, you can select "Only External" from the second dropdown.
• The third dropdown gives you more options to see links to the exact URL you entered only, links to the subdomain of the URL you entered, or links to the root domain of the URL you entered.

Also note that the export is limited to 10,000 URLs. You can increase that to 100,000 by using an advanced report though. Hope that helps!

The first question I'd ask is where are you getting links from? If the sites are not relevant to your business or the article/page in which the link exists is not relevant to your business, I would say it's time to reevaluate your relationship with said consultant. I would also ask the SEO if they're requesting specific anchor text or not? I'd opt for no specific anchor text requests to keep the links more editorial in nature--having too much specific anchor text can get you in trouble with algorithm filters like Penguin.

Hope that helps you get started in evaluating your links!

-Trung

Hi Nate,

Glad to hear that the new site is a success! A few things I would check:

• An obvious one: check to see if there are any errors/warnings reported in webmaster tools for your sitemap.
• Review the URLs included in your XML sitemap to ensure that only URLs responding 200 are included (exception is if you're migrating URLs and want to included URLs responding 301 so that they're picked up by search engines faster, theoretically anyway. But you'd want to update the sitemap once the 301s are removed from the index.)
• Check the 'Index Status' report in Webmaster Tools to make sure there isn't a unanticipated decline in indexed pages.
• Do a 'site:yoursite.com' query to get a broad sense of what pages are actually included in the search results. I've found the Webmaster Tools Submitted/Indexed number to vary in terms of accuracy--not super reliable in my experience. The goal with this check up is to ensure that your site's main pages are indexed. You can include subfolders if you want to get more granular, e.g. 'site:yoursite.com/subfolder'.
• Monitor the page's sending visits from organic search in Google Analytics. This will also give you a better sense of what's indexed.

Hope this helps you get started!

-Trung

Hi Peter,

I do not think you need to include the word 'hire' in every URL. As you mentioned, Google likely has a good understanding of what your page/site is about based on the content.

From a site architecture perspective, I'd recommend focusing less on the keyword and more on the folders necessary to organize your site content in a logical way for both users and search engines. For example, you might have a URL sub-folder for certain geographic locations, e.g. www.example.co.uk/birmingham/example-job-listing

This structure will also help for future analysis if you want to compare performance across key categories of pages on your site.

-Trung

Hi ShatterBuggy,

It sounds like it's not the sitemap that's the issue, but rather the title tag on the individual pages are missing or empty. Here's the Yoast plugin tutorial section on configuring and optimizing title tags: https://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/#titles

-Trung

Hello there,

Have you had any duplicate content or crawling issues in the past or is this more of a preventative measure? If the pages, as you put it, "would not generate relevant search traffic", then I would argue that it'd make sense to "noindex, follow" based on the assumption that the pages are not currently driving search traffic, and have no real potential to contribute significantly to brand discovery via a search engine in the future.

I wouldn't necessarily say that Google crawling your page more frequently would automatically give you a boost in rankings; it's more associated with whether or not they're crawling pages frequently enough to index updates to the pages. So unless there's evidence that the pages are taking up too much of the crawl bandwidth, it doesn't seem like too much of an issue to me.

All of this to say, take a look at the data to see if a real problem exists--whether crawl resources or duplicate content--before doing anything drastic. And, of course, also understand what you'll be losing by making the updates. If you do choose to prevent crawling via robots.txt and are at all concerned with the duplicate/thin content aspect, remember to implement a noindex and confirm that the pages are removed from search results before disallowing in robots.txt--otherwise, they'll remain indexed.

Hey there,

What tool are you using that is qualifying the page as being keyword stuffed? In my experience, if the keyword is highly relevant to your business, this should not be an issue with Google. More likely an issue with the tool you're using not factoring in business relevance to the keyword--in other words, looking simply at the number of times a word appears without taking context into account. Unless you're seeing a verifiable negative impact, I would not worry about this, assuming that the keyword is as relevant to the business as the example you've outlined above.

If you're really, really convinced that it is negatively affecting your rankings, then you can go wrap your dynamic content in an iframe to prevent search engines from associating the content with the page itself.

-Trung

Hey there,

Based on Open SIte Explorer, there are no external inbound links pointing to either pages; and there are 3 and 5 internal links pointing to each page. So my guess is that it is not a matter of link equity.

One major difference that I can see from the data is that the page that is ranking has a lot more social shares than the page not ranking. And therefore, has probably gotten more visits and activity, which may lead Google to believe that it is the better page for that topic.

In this case, I think consolidating the content would make sense; essentially, updating the ranking page so that it has more comprehensive information about the loan forgiveness program. And, unless you need the page that isn't ranking for other purposes, you will probably want to 301 redirect the page as you've mentioned.

-Trung