External video content in iframe

[Googleankan]

Hi,

On our site we have a lot of video content. The player is hosted by a third party so we are using an iframe to include the content on our site.

The problem is that the content it self (on the third party domain) is shown in the google result.

My question is: Can we ask the third party to disallow the content from indexing in their robots.txt or will that also affect our own use of the video content? For example we use video-sitemaps to include the videos in Google video search (the sitemap links to the videos on our own domain, but we are still using iframes on the pages to collect the content from the third party domain that will then be blocked by robots.txt).

I hope you understand what I mean... Any suggestions?

Thanks a lot!

[PhilNottingham]

Hey,

Yes - this is a classic problem. It should be relatively easy to fix in the hosting platform settings.

What third party provider are you using?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Have you thought about actually hosting the video yourself? I have a few clients have started doing this now for a variety of reasons (control being one of them).

I'm not too sure I would be asking them to Robots the video out, but it does sound like you could do with more control over this and adding in some branding.

Could the video be re-worked so it has an introduction / splash screen? Could you add it to YouTube and create a channel there along with links back?

It sounds to me like you just need to take a look at what other possibilities exist in terms of directing people over to your site.

Andy

[Googleankan]

Ah, and regarding your last note: They will definitly fix the robots.txt if we ask them, I'm just not sure if it's a good idea or if it will mess up on our end as well

[Googleankan]

Hi Andy,

Yes, the video content is owned by us and there are two reasons why I want to remove the serp listing for the third party:

1. Since their listing is for their domain (even though it's a specific subdomain dedicated for us), it's not obvious for the user that the video belongs to us (and we are a very well known brand here in Sweden)
2. When the user clicks in the video listing for the third party, they land directly in the video player. There are no menues, logotypes or anything that actually tells the user that this is our content. And there is no possability for the user to click on a link to get to our website and make a purchase.

And yes, sometimes the serp shows our domain and sometimes the third party domain and I don't actually know how to control this.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Just so I understand, are you wanting to ask for the third party to block the video so only your site appears when the video shows up in the search results?

• Does the video currently show up in the SERPs from your site?
• Is the video content in question owned by you?

At the end of the day, you can ask anyone anything you wish - you just don't know what the answers will be.

Andy