Please, help me to understand these Google results
-
Hello here,
I am eager to know your thoughts on this.
If I search on Google for "fur elise violin sheet music", we are on the second page for our sheet music title of "Fur Elise for violin and piano" (look for "virtualsheetmusic.com"). Ok, that's not very good and I still have an hard time to figure out why there are many crappy and NOT really related websites listed before us, but here is the best (weird) part...
.... search now for "fur elise violin and piano sheet music" which should narrow the query further down and so increase the chances for us to get on the first page results... and in fact we are on the first page with that query, but for a different page and a different music for a different instrument! If you scroll the first page of the results, you will find our site at the end of the 1st page for our version of "Fur Elise" for "viola and piano" and not for "violin and piano"... What the heck!??! Why's that??? Doesn't make any sense too me... why if the user search for "fur elise violin and piano" Google shows "Fur Elise for viola and piano"???!!
I would really appreciate any thoughts on all this.
Thank you in advance!
-
Thank you Peter,
yes, we are aware of that and are working in some way to consolidate multiple versions of the same piece of music via canonical tags. I also think that's the only way to go for us.
Thank you again for your insights!
-
Hmmm... I'm seeing the same page for both searches and you rank higher (about #5) for the longer-tail search (#10 for me on the broader search).
Unfortunately, the violin/viola pages are very similar, content-wise, and might appear thin. I realize that they're legitimate products, but you may be diluting your ranking ability by indexing every variation in this way. You've got 39 arrangements of Für Elise indexed on Google - while they're all unique products, when you multiple that against all of your products and then start to consider search pages, etc., odds are that you may just be trying to rank too many pages.
There's no easy answer here. You could build more authority, of course, or you could consider consolidating somehow - possibly trying to rank one parent page for each score and then let people select the variations/instruments from that parent page (most likely with canonical tags). There's always a trade-off, but right now you're spreading your ranking ability across a lot of similar pages.
-
Hi Miki and thank you for your answer.
Well, I use Firefox private browsing window to see "unbiased" Google results (am I doing it right?), and I cannot see the violin result you mentioned as #7. I see just the "viola" page at #5 (excluding the videos results of course).
I understand that the violin page lacks the Scorch files (that I am going to add in a minute, and I thank you for letting me know about that!), but why Google would prefer to show the user the version for viola if he/she (the user) is actually looking for the "violin" version? Doesn't make any sense to me... does to you?
-
Thank you Jesse, you made a good point here about the video, and I will look into hosting our own videos on our own domain as you are suggesting.
Alexa gives you the overall load times of a website, and I am asking myself how accurate that may be... but even by looking at that, just the first returned results are faster than my whole site, so I don't see that as an important factor to outrank my pages on the Google results. For me, most of those websites are just crap (they may have some better metrics than mine, but most of those results look a long way from what Google consider "high quality" and "trustworthy" websites).
But back to my main question here, I still can't understand why Google is putting our "viola" page when users are searching for the violin version of the music mentioned above, and that's what I am trying to understand.
Thank you again!
-
So I was using Alexa's rankings to determine your site speed. It isn't a HUGE difference, but is worth noting. Consider looking into a service like CloudFlare to serve localized caches based on IP address of the requester... (cloudflare.com)
As for the videos - When you embed a YouTube video into your site, the video is still on YouTube. Therefore, if anybody links to it or shares it the backlink goes to YouTube. (unless they happen to share your exact URL which would be silly because there's a "share" button built right into your video.)
Also, the YouTube page where the original video sits will eventually be ranked and it could end up beating you out of placement much like the example I provided did for you earlier. If this existed say on your own site under a blog or video blog or just video section, then at least your own domain is popping up instead of dailymotion or youtube.
Bottom line is the video being hosted on your own website is a far superior option when it comes to SEO. You want that traffic hitting YOUR server and the backlinks pointing to YOUR domain. Not YouTube's. *(not to mention, ad-free)
Now YouTube can still be a part of a successful SEM campaign.. but I wouldn't put my bread and butter videos on there.
-
Jesse, thank you for your responses and for suggesting Wistia... but I don't understand one thing: YouTube also allow embedding right? What's the difference then?
Also, we actually are embedding our own videos inside our product pages... look at the above mentioned Fur Elise for violin and piano, our own video is also embedded as a YouTube video at the product-page level here below:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/EliseVl.html?tab=video
I am afraid to miss something here...
Also, about your mentioned "the pages outranking you (beyond the youtube vids) all load faster than yours", I don't understand how you can see that... I have searched for "fur elise violin sheet music", and all the sites before me are slower with the only exception of one which is fast like mine. I have tested them with the following tool:
http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Ideas??!!
-
Because Wistia allows you to embed on your own site. Thus, if you have an awesome video that people are watching/linking to/travelling to/sharing on social etc, Google will pick it up and your site's ranking will improve. Not to mention if that video gets ranked on dailymotion.com, it's driving traffic to somebody else's website instead of yours.
Sure you can have a link to your site, but you're losing traffic by adding that extra hurdle. You might get a 20% CTR there if you're lucky.. At that point it seems silly to allow some other domain to reap the rewards of your awesome popular video.
Also if somebody wants to embed the video, they can do so and it's a backlink you just gained (via wistia of course)
That's the quick version (sorry busy monday)
-
can you expound a bit why wistia vs youtube (being the #2 search engine?)
-
Oh excuse me, it seems you do have a video displaying on that first page of results. Which technically gives you three of the 10 results on that SERP. WHOA!
This would be even better if the video was hosted on your domain, in your blog. Seriously consider moving it there.
(this is the link I'm referencing: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x10zfwm_ludwig-van-beethoven-s-fur-elise-sheet-music-for-violin-and-piano-sheet-music-video-score_music)
-
I came here to say exactly this. You're absolutely lucky to have 2 spots on page 1 for the same keyword.
Also I'd like to point out that the pages outranking you (beyond the youtube vids) all load faster than yours. Just an observation. Speed is a factor.
Also, why don't you get some video content in there? Those seem to be ranking well. (HINT: Use a video hosting platform like wistia.. skip youtube)
-
First of all, when I search for "fur elise violin and piano sheet music" your pages come up TWICE on page one - results number 6, and 7.
The Viola page comes in at #6, and the Violin at #7.
I would rather have two results rather than one - so consider yourself lucky. (I'm not sure if this is coming up like this on your SERP page, but regardless - your results are personalized for you - I would check www.startpage.com - and I'll bet you see the "real" results (#7 & #8)
One thing that stands out to me about your Viola page which may be why it is beating you Volin page:
It includes "Scorch" files, which the other page does not
Hope this helps
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Penalized By Google
My site name is bestmedtour .it's in English. I also want to have the Arabic version of the site. If I translate it with Google Translate, is it possible that the Arabic version of the site will be penalized?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aalinlandacc0 -
I'm looking for a bulk way to take off from the Google search results over 600 old and inexisting pages?
When I search on Google site:alexanders.co.nz still showing over 900 results. There are over 600 inexisting pages and the 404/410 errrors aren't not working. The only way that I can think to do that is doing manually on search console using the "Removing URLs" tool but is going to take ages. Any idea how I can take down all those zombie pages from the search results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexanders1 -
How to get product info into Google Search Result box
Hi, in the last couple of weeks I get more and more search results with a product and prices of retailers below (see sample attached). Are there Schema parameters one could use to have a bigger chance to appear there? Thanks in advance Dieter Lang 0EYJtRJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco1 -
Fetch as Google -- Does not result in pages getting indexed
I run a exotic pet website which currently has several types of species of reptiles. It has done well in SERP for the first couple of types of reptiles, but I am continuing to add new species and for each of these comes the task of getting ranked and I need to figure out the best process. We just released our 4th species, "reticulated pythons", about 2 weeks ago, and I made these pages public and in Webmaster tools did a "Fetch as Google" and index page and child pages for this page: http://www.morphmarket.com/c/reptiles/pythons/reticulated-pythons/index While Google immediately indexed the index page, it did not really index the couple of dozen pages linked from this page despite me checking the option to crawl child pages. I know this by two ways: first, in Google Webmaster Tools, if I look at Search Analytics and Pages filtered by "retic", there are only 2 listed. This at least tells me it's not showing these pages to users. More directly though, if I look at Google search for "site:morphmarket.com/c/reptiles/pythons/reticulated-pythons" there are only 7 pages indexed. More details -- I've tested at least one of these URLs with the robot checker and they are not blocked. The canonical values look right. I have not monkeyed really with Crawl URL Parameters. I do NOT have these pages listed in my sitemap, but in my experience Google didn't care a lot about that -- I previously had about 100 pages there and google didn't index some of them for more than 1 year. Google has indexed "105k" pages from my site so it is very happy to do so, apparently just not the ones I want (this large value is due to permutations of search parameters, something I think I've since improved with canonical, robots, etc). I may have some nofollow links to the same URLs but NOT on this page, so assuming nofollow has only local effects, this shouldn't matter. Any advice on what could be going wrong here. I really want Google to index the top couple of links on this page (home, index, stores, calculator) as well as the couple dozen gene/tag links below.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jplehmann0 -
Canonical Help (this is a nightmare)
Hi, We're new to SEO and trying to fix our domain canonical issue. A while back we were misusing the "link canonical" tag such that Google was tracking params (e.g. session ids, tagging ) all as different unique urls. This created a nightmare as now Google thinks there's millions of pages associated with our domain when the reality is really a couple thousand unique links. Since then, we've tried to fix this by: 1) specifying params to ignore via SEO webmasters 2) properly using the canonical tag. However, I'm still recognizing there's a bunch of outsanding search results that resulted from this mess. Any idea on expectation on when we'd see this cleaned up? I'm also recognizing that google is looking at http://domain.com and https://domain.com as 2 different pages even though we specify to only look at "http://domain.com" via the link canonical tag. Again, is this just a matter of waiting for Google to update its results? We submitted a site map but it seems like it's taking forever for the results of our site to clear up... Any help or insight would greatly be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sfgmedia0 -
Google places Ad
Like adwords is their any good way of advertising a business place at Google map? If the answer is yes.Can you please take me through the process and give me rough idea about cost?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csfarnsworth0 -
Help!!! Am I being Attacked???
Hello, I do not believe so much in spammy links attacks and I definitely do not believe my site is worth attacking. However, I'm seeing new links pointing to my site that I have no idea where they come from. I just spotted three articles on a poor crappy article site with exact match keywords point to me. The articles are completely unique (copyscaped them) and they were posted according to the site time stamp during Oct and Nov 2012. (And they Appear in the WMT recently discovered links from more or less the same time). What to do (besides for disavowing this domain)? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Please review my site
Hi I hope that all is going well in Seattle! I just make this site and I would like to be judged! site is http://mangakaotaku.com I am open for recommendations and review. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0