Hi Ajay,

Great question. First off, I think that both a video sitemap and the correct schema optimizations are extremely important in getting your videos to rank. Personally, I would start off with creating a video sitemap and then branch off into utilizing schema. This is just a matter of preference for me because I like to get the foundational elements done first.

In terms of what tools you can use - I know of a few. If your site is in WordPress the Yoast Video SEO plugin has worked well for me in the past. If not, here are some great posts on Video Sitemaps and the best process for creating them.

https://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/

https://moz.com/blog/video-sitemap-guide-for-vimeo-and-youtube

Hope that helps!

Serge

Hi there,

Great question.

The short answer:

• You can't control whether or not Google shows sitelinks for your site.
• If Google decides to show sitelinks for your site, you can't control which ones they show.
• The best you can do is optimize your site hierarchy, internal links, and on-page elements as best as possible to make it clear (and simple) for Google to crawl and understand seperate sections of your site.

Google used to have a "sitelink demotion" tool that let you submit links you wanted removed from sitelinks that were showing up for your domain. Google got rid of that function earlier this year. Either way, it was the opposite of what you are trying to achieve (get sitelinks showing for your domain).

Google's recommendation is to "...make sure you use anchor text and alt text that's informative, compact, and avoids repetition."

In other words, make sure your site has a clear hierarchy, that internal links are pointing to important sections of the site, that anchor text is descriptive, that pages are optimized clearly, and of course that your site being crawled accurately.

Hope that helps!

Hi there,

First off, I think you made a good call on changing the URL structure and title tags. It sounds like you are seeing positive results from an organic ranking perspective as well as a user experience perspective (this is particularly beneficial because UX plays such a vital role in organic rankings now).

To answer/bring up your specific concerns...

1. How important is the product code to each individual product? If your company is B2B and these product codes are extremely helpful for other businesses I would say it's definitely worth considering. However, if your company sells standard items directly to customers, I think this concern would vary from product-to-product. In other words, if you think there is a substantial amount of users who are searching for the product code, this is something I would consider.

2. In terms of including the brand in the title tag, I would say yes. I don't have much backstory on who your customers are and what you are selling to them, but just based off of this information I would say it would be more beneficial to include the brand name in the title tag. Something like you suggested would work great. "BRAND1 - Product Name - Your company name" would be another way to think about it.

Hope that helps!

Hi there,

I haven't used the areaServed markup, but here are my thoughts:

• If your business _actually _serves all the different areas you are marking up, the markup is legitimate and therefore should be safe. However, if you are trying to manipulate/be spammy with your markup Google could penalize the site.
• In terms of how Google will read the markup, that's a tough question to answer. If there aren't any errors with it in Google's schema testing tool then it's safe to assume that if Google chooses to read/consider the schema markup it would understand that "x business provides services to the following areas".
• Where your business appears on the local pack is determined by many different inputs (such as reviews, quality/quantity of local listings, schema, etc.) I would imagine if Google chooses to consider this particular markup it could help your business appear in more local mack packs if the competition isn't much stronger when it comes to reviews, an actual brick and mortar location, etc.

Hope that's somewhat helpful—happy for anyone to disagree/jump in with more information.

Hi Brian,

Google can definitely crawl Javascript, although it is limited in a sense. Here is a great article addressing this.

I have seen many websites use the solution that you mention in your second paragraph. That is, creating a separate section of the domain (or creating a subdomain) for users who are logging in. GoogleBot will not be able to crawl anything that is beyond a login portal, so this is the most common solution. Of course you can also disallow the specific path or subdomain in robots.txt as well!

It comes down to how much content that you have behind the login portal. You want to figure out which part of your site you want to be crawled, and which parts you don't want. After that point it's a matter of figuring out the best solution for blocking that content from crawlers.

Hope that helps!

Thanks for the question!

It sounds like you are concerned about Google being able to crawl your site, and you think the

<noscript>tag on every page might be the cause? In your example it looks like if someone tries to access your page with JavaScript disabled they would be redirected to an error page? </p> <p>Anyway you can share your domain so I can better assist?</p> <p>Thanks!</p></noscript>

Hi there,

Others have already mentioned great starting points. The steps I would take here in order would look something like:

1. Confirm that I'm looking at the right data, and identify where the drop is coming from. Is it mostly the blog? A certain section? Top performing pages? Homepage? Or is it more of an all around drop to most pages?
2. Once you answer the first question, it will allow you to prioritize where to look. If you identify most of the drop happened on your blog for example, you can focus your attention there to answer questions like, "Have we changed anything on the blog recently from a technical perspective?", "Are we confident there is nothing that is stopping us from ranking technically?", etc.
3. The more difficult situation is when there is a general decrease in traffic to most pages on the site (doesn't seem to be a rhyme or a reason). In these cases I would look back at what updates have affected the site before to see a trend. When did the drop happen? Does that drop line up with a recent update? If so, what was that update about? Then some form of a technical audit, content audit, etc would be reasonable next steps to essentially identify the biggest issues in each.

Some other points in no particular order

• Remember that more content/pages does not necessarily mean more traffic. Because your formula was working a year ago doesn't mean it will work now (or work as well).
• Looking at your site briefly, you have a good amount of content (~17,000 pages) but it's difficult to navigate and find articles. If I had to guess, I'd say the site could benefit from a re-design and content overhaul/audit to ensure there are not too many overlapping pages and that they are easily discoverable by users (and crawlers).

I know that's a bit of a brain dump but hope that (along with other response) helps point you to a starting point!

Also, some more information I can gather from your question:

• that noscript is telling non-js users/bots to meta refresh to an error page
• Google shouldn't be confused by that, but Screaming Frog would (and potentially other search engines)
• it is probably also not the best experience for non-js users: You can display an error messages without redirecting to another URL.

Hope that's helpful...

Hi there,

There's no standard format for online phone numbers although I've seen people recommending to stick with either dashes or periods, and to not use parenthesis.

The more important recommendation would be to make sure users can click to call directly on the phone number, as well as setting up tracking through analytics so you could see how many people called your business through your website.

Hope that helps!

Serge