Never heard of this being a problem. More likely it's a plus as these things often draw extra interest/traffic to a page.

Any chance that other issues were created when the change was made? A code change? An inadvertant edit to a robots META tag? Something like that?

Thanks for your answer,

No. Nothing else was changed. Just added these couple of lines of embedding code. That's it.

I agree that it's weird because the page does have much more value with this content than without.

I created and posted/updated a much bigger site map at the same time (on google site maps). I realized this yesterday. Maybe this was the negatively influencing factor.

Could this be?

Any idea?

Thanks

Francisco

The new sitemap could be a factor. That would be strange, I think, but I've seen strange things happen. If the only thing that changed was a couple lines of code on your page, I would expect that the new sitemap could be the culprit. Do you happen to notice if your page is still indexed by the SEs? I had something almost identical happen (without the video), and it turned out the page had been de-indexed by Google for a short period of time.

Thanks for your answer,

I double checked and the pages are still indexed in both Googgle and yahoo.

What is very strange is that the change in the 2 main pages I tested was brutal.

These two pages were getting 500 hits/month regularly since July. I make the change and they both suddenly dropped to 50 hits/month for November.

I submitted site maps earlier but did not check if there was that type of traffic drop in some key pages.

Any more feed back of ideas on this topic?

Greatly appreciated!

Thanks

Francisco

Google encourages you to embed their video. Now that YouTube also belongs to Google, I doubt that Google would derank your site. I faced same problem but not by adding video. I added too many links (more than 100) to my page and the traffic gone down from 1000 visitors per month to zero.

"Google encourages you to embed their video"

Well, that would be good news, then!

Thanks for letting me know...

Can I ask you, how do you know? Is this written somewhere in the google's webmasters best behaviors policies or does this come from another source?

Any other feed back on the topic?

Thank you

Francisco

For your info, Google recommendation is to have not more than 100 linka per page. If more than that, it will treat the page as link farm that has no value for page ranking. Sorry that I cannot provide you the link for you to check because I read about it long time ago and it is from Google.

[edited by: Mistra at 6:17 pm (utc) on Nov. 28, 2006]

Thanks for getting back with an Answer Mistra, I am aware of the 100 links limit. I'll keep it in mind though and trust your word with the video thing. I appreciate your advice.

Anyone else experienced a similar drop when posting videos or knows anything else related with this issue?

Thank you

Francisco

Your embedding a video from the Youtube site on your site is surely similiar or identical to a hotlink. That is pulling in material from an external site and bypassing any adverts ... etc on that site. I personally block hotlinking and surely this is similiar with Google perhaps give your page a penalty.

What do Google get from your embedding the video, unless they get some revenue from it? I would be surprised if they would be happy with this! Can you tell me if the traffic lost is proportionally greater for Google than the other search engines?

Hmmm, maybe Yahoo/MSN could give a bonus for pages that hotlink from Google sites :=)

an I ask you, how do you know? Is this written somewhere in the google's webmasters best behaviors policies or does this come from another source?

I personally block hotlinking and surely this is similiar with Google perhaps give your page a penalty.

Enrich your site with Google Video
[services.google.com...]

I doubt very much that embedding a video has anything to do with your drop.

Thanks for your answer Tidal,

Unfortunately I don't have the detail for each search engine ranking before the change. I get the feeling though that most of the traffic before the change was coming from Google.

This means that my pages were probably ranking in the top 3 before. Right now it ranks #10 Google and #13 Yahoo for one page and #17 Google and #31 Yahoo for the other page (This is for a specific targeted key phrase which was generating 99% of the traffic for that page)

I'm not familiar with hotlinking. Can you tell me exactly why having a link to a Youtube video on my site could be perceived as a bad thing for Google?

Isn't it what everyone does? Linking sites to sites just to share valuable info?

I am puzzled.

Can you tell me more?

Thank you

Francisco

The Contractor: Of course I don't know, you say -

"I doubt very much that embedding a video has anything to do with your drop."

I note you don't say say you know it has nothing to do with the drop. A strong belief though, which could easily be right and if Google supply a routine to embed external content I agree with you.

If not and Francisco has embedded content directly via html it could be a problem.

vitalcoaching: Sorry I didn't see your post before my last post, hotlinking is -

Using another websites content on your website so if I need a video of a mobile red widget I just link my page to a video on another web site and they pay the bandwidth cost. Not ethical without permission and sometimes slow but it works unless the other web site blocks hotlinking.

Youtube/Google may allow this and if you went through an option on Youtube/Google to do this, rather than cutting and pasting a link into your page you should be okay.

I note you don't say say you know it has nothing to do with the drop.

Something you learn over time. Never believe you know it all or you simply open yourself up to trouble.

Tidal,

Thanks for the clarification about hotlinking. I think that in that case, embedding videos on my site would not be hotlinking as it is 100% part of youtube and google videos policies to allow this.

They offer an embedding code for every video which is posted. You can use the code and post it on your blog or site.

Thanks for the info, though. I am gaining extra knowledge with every post.

Thanks to everyone who responded so far.

Anything else I should know about this specific issue?

Francisco