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 -
Google snippet chosen why?
We have a page about buying property in the Megeve area of the Alps in France. We are No.2 on Google.co.uk for the term "megeve property for sale" and No.1 for "megeve property". http://www.prestigeproperty.co.uk/MegeveProperty/Properties.asp If you search for "megeve property for sale", Google serves our META description as the snippet: Ski chalets, homes and apartments for sale in this exclusive, prestigious Rhone Alpes village - 520000-16500000 EUR. However, we noticed that searching for just "megeve property" serves up a much better snippet taken from the text on the page: A crucial factor for potential property buyers is that there is a strong rental market in Megève and this remains high all year around with properties close to the ... Does anyone know why Google would serve this particular snippet instead of the META description. Is it the number of strong and descriptive words used, or some other reason?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PPGUKLTD0 -
Help with htaccess
I just setup a WP install in a subfolder: domain.com/development/ However, there is an existing htaccess file in the root which contains the following: RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z_0-9-]+)$ /index.php?page=$1 [QSA]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z_0-9-]+)/$ /index.php?page=$1 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z_0-9-]+)/([a-z]+)$ /index.php?page=$1&comp=$2 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z_0-9-]+)/([a-z]+)/$ /index.php?page=$1&comp=$2 [QSA] I need to leave the rules as-is due to the nature of CMS (not WP) under the root domain. Is it possible to include an exception or condition which allows URL requests containing /development/ to resolve to that folder? I tried to add: RewriteRule ^development/([A-Za-z_0-9-]+)$ /development/index.php?page=$1 [QSA] but this seems to send it in a loop back to the root. Thanks!!!0 -
Google Phone Numbers
What process is performed to get a company's phone number to show as "A" on google maps. Google displays the phone number for the company on the map as "A" first. It would be beneficial to get that position. Is there a sub-category of seo that does this? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JML11790 -
Google Local oddity
So I spotted something a little weird... one of my client's Google Local placements in blended results has the domain name - complete with the .com extension appearing where the business name typically appears: Businessxyz.com www. businessxyz .com of Google reviews Has anyone seen this? I setup their Google Places account quite some time ago and used the business name - not the url. I also setup their Google+ and Local page - using the name. None of the page titles on the website contain the url. I simply can not pinpoint where G is pulling this from or why for that matter. All competitors are appearing with business name - only my client has the domain name visible for the particular local search query. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0 -
I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure out why google stopped crawling.. any help is appreciated
This is going to be kind of long, simply because there is a background to the domain name that is not typical to anybody in the world really and I'm not sure if its possible that it was penalized or ranked lower because of that or not. Because of that I'm going to include it with the hopes that giving the full picture some nice soul in the world who has more knowledge in this than me see's something or knows something and can point me in the right direction. Our site has been around for a few years, at one point the domain was seized by homeland security ICE, and then they had to give it back in Dec. which sparked a lot of the SOPA PIPA stuff and we became the poster child so to speak. The site had previously been up since 2008, but due to that whole mess the site was down for 13 months on the dreaded seized server with a scary warning graphic and site title which caused quite obviously a bunch of 404 errors and who knows what else damage to anything we'd had before that as far as page rank and incoming links. we had a lot of incoming links from high quality sites. We were advised upon getting the domain back to pretty much scrap all the old content that was on the site prior and just start fresh.. which we did. Googlebot started crawling slowly, but then as we started getting back into the swing of things people started linking to us,some with high page rank, we were getting indexed quite frequently and ranking high on search results in our niche.. Then something happened on March 4th, we had arguably our best day with google traffic, we'd been linked back by places like Huff Post etc for content in our niche.. and the next day literally it was a freefall. Darn near nothing. I've attached a screen shot from webmaster tools so you can see how drastic it was. I went crazy, trying to figure out what was wrong, searching obsessively through webmaster tools looking for any indication of a problem, searched the site on google site:dajaz1.com and what comes up is page 2 page 3 page 45 page 46. It's also taken to indexing our category and tag pages and even our search pages. I've now set those all to noindex follow but when I look at where the googlebots are at on the site, they're on the categories, pages, author pages, and tags. Some of our links are still getting indexed, but doing a search just of our site name and we're ranking below many of the media sites that have written about our legal issues, when a month ago we were at least top result for our own name. I've racked my brain trying to figure out the issue. I've disabled plugins, I'm on fetch as google bot all the time making sure our stuff is at least coming out as 200 (we had 2 days where we were getting 403 errors due to a super-cache issue, but once fixed googlebot returned like it never left) I've literally watched 1000 videos, read 100 forums, added in SEO plugins, tried to optimize the site to the point I'm worried I'm over doing it.. and still they've barely begun to crawl. As you can see there is some activity in the last 2-3 days, but even submitting a new site map once I changed the theme out of desperation it's only indexed 16. I've looked for errors all through webmaster tools and I can't find anything to tell me why that happened, how to fix it, and how to get googlebot to like us again. I'm pulling my hair out here. The links we have incoming are high quality links like huffington post , spin, complex, etc. Those haven't slowed down at all, we do outgoing links to sites we trust and are high quality as well. I've got interns working on how they're writing titles and such, I've gone through and attempted to fix duplicate pages and titles.. I've been going through and re-writing meta description tags What am I missing? I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure out what the issue is. Eternally grateful for any help provided. jnzb6.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | malady0 -
Why do I have better results with absolute search
Hi, I completed the optimization of my website, and while my rankings have improved, i seem to have consistently better resultats with absolute search terms: ex: i'm better ranked on "word1 word2" than just word1 word2 without the guillemets. Do you have any idea why? As most people perform search without guillemets, i would like to improve my rankings with these searches too. thanks, cedric
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smartgrains0 -
How to position in local Google
Hello, It's been easy for me to jump in .com - English only results. But, regional google is making me problems. How to position there? What are the top 3 key elements for ranking locally that don't matter much internationally? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DaBomb110