Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How can I make sure Google is crawling a link from an iframe (video)?
-
Do they crawl backlinks from an iframe example from a Youtube video embedded in a blog post? TIA!
-
That test in no-way proves that the link passed PageRank.
I'm not sure about an href within an iframe, but equally I don't see any reason why you would do that?
-
So this test is not true:
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-iframe-link-14558.html
What if there's an a href tag (can be seen through "inspect element") within the iframe embedded in a webpage?
-
Nope, they can't. Those links are within the iframe.
If you're trying to get link equity from embedded video, it'll need to be with crediting text links or images outside of the actual player, as overlays are done with JavaScript, which doesn't pass PageRank by all accounts.
-
We created videos that will be embedded to other sites and we have to take advantage of the backlinks.
Regarding Youtube videos, it was just another question if Google can crawl backlinks (the hyperlinked Youtube logo within a video embedded to an external site or webpage) of a Youtube page.
-
Not quite sure I understand... Are you trying to build links to the YouTube video on youtube.com? if so, an embed through an iframe does sort of count as a "link" to the video (i.e. it provides ranking equity), but only in the unique case of YouTube videos.
Or are you wondering if links in the descriptions/overlays will pass PageRank?
-
This is for link building, Ryan. Do you think Google will still follow the links from an iframe?
-
Ah, ya, since OP is asking about these videos after they're embedded in other sites maybe he means will this be like link building? Or maybe he's asking about view lift and popularity of the original video? OP, I think you'll need to clarify some to get a more precise answer.
-
I wrote that post, and it's now nearly three years out of date.
They have got better at crawling iframes since then, and now you can get a video indexed if it's embedded in an iframe.
However, I don't think this relates to the question specifically?
-
Google see iframes as basically "a window into other sites". As such, no, they don't crawl links in this way - however, they will likely then crawl the page which the iframe references, and thereby pick up any backlinks there.
I'm not quite sure how this might related to an embedded YouTube video, but YouTube videos are indexed instantly anyway once they're published because Google don't need to crawl YouTube (they have access to the database)
-
Thanks Ryan! These videos will be embedded in other websites.
-
This post is fairly extensive in regards to your question and should give you ideas even beyond what you're asking here, http://moz.com/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo but if you're looking for the highlight, this is still pretty applicable advice today:
Embed the content with HTML5 and JavaScript or Flash, but not an iframe
Unfortunately, Google are not very good at crawling iframes at the moment; so if you want videos to be indexed, you need to make sure you’re embedding content in an HTML5 player with Flash fallback, or a pure Flash player.
If the video is being embedded on your own site you can also create a transcription for it on the same page and then place the links in according spots. Cheers!
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
-
How Many Links to Disavow at Once When Link Profile is Very Spammy?
We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links. We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results: -42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
-12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
-38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed. This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them> I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once? Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that? Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups? Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.0 -
Can Google Crawl & Index my Schema in CSR JavaScript
We currently only have one option for implementing our Schema. It is populated in the JSON which is rendered by JavaScript on the CLIENT side. I've heard tons of mixed reviews about if this will work or not. So, does anyone know for sure if this will or will not work. Also, how can I build a test to see if it does or does not work?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
How can I stop spam Google Organic traffic?
Hey Moz, I'm a rather experienced SEO who just encountered a problem I have never faced. I am hoping to get some advice or be pointed in the right direction. I just started work for a new client. Really great client and website. Nicer than most design/content. They will need some rel canonical work but that is not the issue here. The traffic looked great at first glance 131k visits in April. Google Analytics Acquisition Overview showed 94% of the traffic as organic. When I dug deeper and looked at the organic source I saw that Google was 99.9% of it. Normal enough. Then I looked at the time on site and my jaw dropped. 118,454 Organic New Users for Google only stayed on the site for 3 seconds. There is no way that the traffic is real. It does not match what Google Webmaster tools, Moz, and Ahrefs are telling me. How do I stop a service that is sending fake organic Google traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | placementLabs0 -
Do search engines crawl links on 404 pages?
I'm currently in the process of redesigning my site's 404 page. I know there's all sorts of best practices from UX standpoint but what about search engines? Since these pages are roadblocks in the crawl process, I was wondering if there's a way to help the search engine continue its crawl. Does putting links to "recent posts" or something along those lines allow the bot to continue on its way or does the crawl stop at that point because the 404 HTTP status code is thrown in the header response?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brad-causes0 -
How Do You Remove Video Thumbnails From Google Search Result Pages?
This is going to be a long question, but, in a nutshell, I am asking if anyone knows how to remove video thumbnails from Google's search result pages? We have had video thumbnails show up next to many of our organic listings in Google's search result pages for several months. To be clear, these are organic listings for our site, not results from performing a video search. When you click on the thumbnail or our listing title, you go to the same page on our site - a list of products or the product page. Although it was initially believed that these thumbnails drew the eye to our listings and that we would receive more traffic, we are actually seeing severe year over year declines in traffic to our category pages with thumbnails vs. category pages without thumbnails (where average rank remained relatively constant). We believe this decline is due to several things: An old date stamp that makes our listing look outdated (despite the fact that we can prove Google has spidered and updated their cache of these pages as recent as 2 days ago). We have no idea where Google is getting this datestamp from. An unrelated thumbnail to the page title, etc. - sometimes a picture of a man's face when the category is for women's handbags A difference in intent - user intends to shop or browse, not watch a video. They skip our listing because it looks like a video even though both the thumbnail and our listing click through to a category page of products. So we want to remove these video thumbnails from Google's search results without removing our pages from the index. Does anyone know how to do this? We believed that this connection between category page and video was happening in our video sitemap. We have removed all reference to video and category pages in the sitemap. After making this change and resubmitting the sitemap in Webmaster Tools, we have not seen any changes in the search results (it's been over 2 weeks). I've been reading and it appears many believe that Google can identify video embedded in pages. That makes sense. We can certainly remove videos from our category pages to truly remove the connection between category page URL and video thumbnail. However, I don't believe this is enough because in some cases you can find video thumbnails next to listings where the page has not had a video thumbnail in months (example: search for "leather handbags" and find www.ebags.com/category/handbags/m/leather - that video does not exist on that page and has not for months. Similarly, do a search for "handbags" and find www.ebags.com/department/handbags. That video has not been on that page since 2010. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharieBags0 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Can Affiliate Links Harm Your Rank?
Does Google interpret Affiliate links as paid links? If so, can Affiliate links harm your rank if they are not properly tagged with a no-follow? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0