Wistia vs. YouTube
-
Hello, Mozzers! Sorry if I've missed a thread on this, but I didn't find anything after searching for a while...
I've used Wistia for years - LOVE the service and the company! Had great luck getting Rich Snippets, ranked well... until the recent Google change. Now all of my Wistia thumbnails have disappeared (though my rankings have stayed strong, thank goodness!) M question is, does it make sense to now embed YouTube videos on our site, and to create a video sitemap with those pages, with the hope that Google will rank the page better than it otherwise would have, knowing that there is valuable (video) content on the page? This is new videos, I'm not thinking of replacing my Wistia videos at this time.
I'll probably need to clarify as I see your responses, since this is a tricky set of interrelated decisions. Thanks for any thoughts that anyone may have!
~ Scott
-
Seems like Google is leaning toward favoring YouTube content with the removal of Rich Snippets. If you can get the same SEO benefit using a video site map and embedding YouTube videos instead, why not have your website visitors increase your YouTube video view counts and possibly add subscribers while you're at it.
-
Makes total sense! I hoped that having a page that ranks well already due to solid content, might get a slight lift by having a relevant video on it as well. Thanks again for your help!
-
Having rich media types (i.e. images, video, interactive elements) does appear to correlate slightly with higher rankings, but at best it's going to be a minor ranking signal at best. I don't think having video on a page is necessarily a good signal that a page has value, since there isn't a barrier to entry to embed YouTube videos and there are a lot of very low quality sites out there that just exist to scrape and embed YouTube videos.
In short, no I wouldn't suggest moving to YouTube on the basis of SEO generally - though obviously it's hard for me to offer any more specific advice without further context.
Start by working out A) if your content will be valuable to an audience who find it through YouTube search/recommended videos B) What your main goals are for each of your videos.
Cheers,
Phil.
-
Phil - wow, I'm honored to have a direct response from you! I've been impressed by what I've heard / read from you over the years!
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that simply sticking a YouTube video on a page would cause it to rank higher (as Google owns YouTube), but that having video content on a page can be a signal that the page has more value, than a page without video content at all. That would be true, right? (This assumes, of course, that the video content aligns with the text of the page, and is perceived to add value to the user experience - always comes first, I realize!!)
The main question in my mind is this: in the past, I used Wistia videos in order to get Rich Snippets, which seemed to get better click-throughs from the SERP than non-rich-snippet entries. I couldn't use YouTube to get Rich Snippets, since they weren't self-hosted. Now that I'm not getting Rich Snippets at all, I'm trying to decide whether to start using YouTube instead.
Thanks so much for your help - I look forward to reading your blog post tomorrow! ~ Scott
-
Hey Scott,
So I'm actually going to go one better here to try to respond to this question adequately and am going to write a blog post which will be published on the Moz blog tomorrow at this URL - http://moz.com/blog/video-seo-post-rich-snippets
Hopefully this post will shed some light on the choices you're facing and the decisions you should make. However, I did want to just quickly cover off one misunderstanding with this issue.
Embedding YouTube videos won't make your own pages rank higher compared with ranking videos from other providers. Just because Google owns YouTube doesn't mean ranking benefit is given to sites which embed YouTube videos (do you know how many terrible scraper sites are out there?!) in just the same way sites are not given preference for using Google AdSense on their site as opposed to other advertising platforms (in fact - Panda was designed to penalise those sites which are there just to generate ad revenue without provide value).
The decision about whether to move from Wistia should not be based on whether you will rank higher or not, since neither option will fundamentally make a difference. It may end up being wise, in your instance, to start using YouTube - but only if you can see benefit to having an audience watch the videos on YouTube.com and subsequently not visit your site.
Determine what the best user experience will be - and you'll probably end up with the right strategic answer.
Cheers,
Phil.
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
-
Http vs Https Related Rankings Drop?
I've noticed in a number of keyword ranking tools (Moz included) that our rankings have dropped substantially for a number of our top performing keywords precisely 7 days back. When you view the attached screenshot you'll see there was a drastic drop in the overall organic impressions as well as a drop in keyword rankings. I also noticed that all the keywords which have dropped in rank now show with the https version of our home page url. I've read up on this and it believe that this should not cause a drop in rankings but we have even added https as a domain in webmaster tools with no improvement. Quite simply, has Google de-indexed our http home page url which was previously tied to our higher rankings for our core keywords? How can we get this back without "disavowing" our https version of the site. We're not doing anything to game search results so I dont think we're being penalized, simply there is some sort technical glitch taking place between recognizing HTTP vs HTTPS versions of our site. Our home page is goo.gl/qVPRwf and an example keyword is "wedding ring sets his and hers" Can anyone recommend further debugging steps or have an understanding of what can be done at this point? Also, if it helps, I have studied the Help Center, read the FAQs and searched for similar questions with no success.wedding ring sets his and hers impressions%20-%20ranking%20drop.png?dl=0
Algorithm Updates | | punitshah0 -
Content vs articles vs blogs is there a difference?
I was wondering is there really a difference between website content, articles or blogs and most important do search engines see it differently? My website is pretty much an ecommerce site and most of my long text is on my blog. The only other pages that have much content is the homepage, all the other pages may have a paragraph. I am just wondering if i need to make more actual pages with text/content or is having my blogs good enough? I am no expert in seo and just wondering if i am wasting too much money on getting blogs written or should i get more content. Content being a page called commercial printing and blog being a page called why do do i need commercial printing? Also would it matter to the users who find the site? Would the users come to my site just looking for information or would they actually think of me for the service?
Algorithm Updates | | topclass0 -
SinglePlatform's Restaurant Menu Across Web Properties vs "SEO-Optimized"
Surprised I wasn't able to find an existing answer given that SinglePlatform apparently serves 500,000 SMBs with menus that appear on over 150 publisher websites. Given Panda's razor-sharp intolerance for duplicate content, am I safe to assume that any claim of SinglePlatform's menu on a local restaurant being beneficial to your SEO is now spurious? If so, what's best way to handle this as a potential SEO liability while still having one of their nicely formatted restaurant menus on your site? For reference: http://www.openforum.com/articles/using-singleplatform-to-build-a-digital-presence Update May 7, 2012 Connected directly with the folks at SinglePlatform, and the answer here is a lot simpler than my over-thinking of it. The menu usually sits within an iFrame or widget so that's that. But the ability to truthfully show an up-to-date menu for any given establishment is a legit way to address the healthy amount of local search intent that seems to be directed at exactly that. Overall a pretty slick platform, looking forward to seeing how they grow into the SMB, local & mobile in the coming months, I think the space is ripe to benefit from products/services that take advantage of these sorts of economies of scale.
Algorithm Updates | | mgalica0 -
Youtube, Video SEO, & my site
For our business we are building a collection of videos ranging including product info, how-to's, and some funny content. My understanding is that if you embed these onto my site from youtube you don't get any credit for these videos on the web site even if submitting a video sitemap. My thinking is to post these videos to youtube and to host them on our own site and submit a video sitemap including the videos on our site. We would change the name, description, etc. on youtube vs. what's o our web site. Question is - is this the best strategy? Do I get penalized for duplicate content? They are important for both the social aspects of youtube and the content vaue of our web site.
Algorithm Updates | | uwaim20120 -
Hyphens vs Underscores
I am optimizing a site which uses underscores rather than hyphens as word separators (such_as_this.php vs. such-as-this.php). Most of these pages have been around since 2007, and I am hesitant to just redirect to a new page because I am worried it will cause the rankings to slip. Would you recommend changing the file names to be in hyphenated format and place 301 redirects on the pages with underscores, or stick with the existing pages? Is there anything else that would work better? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | BluespaceCreative1 -
Organic ranking vs Local ranking
After reading this blog entry from Dr Pete on Mirametrix, my question would be:
Algorithm Updates | | echo1
What's more important for a local company, being in the 7 pack or in the top 10 organic results? Which one attracts more clicks? Is the optimization for local ranking just became more important than the traditional SEO?0 -
Data on Google Vs Bing, et al and changes to sites.
I am curious to know if anyone has any data that correlates site/page changes like content or Title Tag, H1, etc. and subsequent movement in rankings on Google and Bing and Yahoo? The equation is for example: ABCSite.com/home-page/ makes a change to the H1 and H2 and one paragraph of content is changed. Over next 6 to 12 weeks changes in page rank for the 3 engines is tracked to see where it started and where it "stopped." Obviously, there are more factors than individual algorithms in play here. An example of that would be that a significant number of sites will be indexed in Google by a dev and not in the others. We see this regularly. So, at least from a timing standpoint, different sites are entering/leaving the fray at different rates. We are going to begin to track this but I would love to see any data already around or speak with anyone involved in such a study about what they found. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | RobertFisher0 -
Is a slash just as good as buying a country specific domain? .com/de vs .de
I guess this question comes in a few parts: 1. Would Google read a 2-letter country code that is after the domain name (after the slash) and recognize it as a location (targeting that country)? Or does is just read it as it would a word. eg. www.marketing.com/de for a microsite for the Germans www.marketing.com/fr for a microsite for the French Or would it read the de and fr as words (not locations) in the url. In which case, would it have worse SEO (as people would tend to search "marketing france" not "marketing fr")? 2. Which is better for SEO and rankings? Separate country specific domains: www.marketing.de and www.marketing.fr OR the use of subfolders in the url: www.marketing.com/de and www.marketing.com/fr
Algorithm Updates | | richardstrange0