Do YouTube videos in iFrames get crawled?
-
There seems to be quite a few articles out there that say iframes cause problems with organic search and that the various bots can't/won't crawl them. Most of the articles are a few years old (including Moz's video sitemap article). I'm wondering if this is still the case with YouTube/Vimeo/etc videos, all of which only offer iFrames as an embed option.
I have a hard time believing that a Google property (YT) would offer an embed option that it's own bot couldn't crawl. However, let me know if that is in fact the case.
Thanks!
Jim
-
Hi Joricia,
What do you use for transcribing? I've tried Dragon but it's video transcription function is useless. Don't really have the money to get everything manually transcribed.
Thanks,
Jim
-
If you do not want to take the gamble with I-frames and want to be certain that your content is found by Google I would use Wistia it comes with everything that you need in order to have a video indexed the proper embed code, video site map and schema you can use third-party companies like "speechpad" to transcribe what is being spoken. Wistia also offers A similar service.
If you do choose to use YouTube I would reembed the video with embedly rember you will have to create your own video XML sitemap, add your own schema you may use to YouTube content to a website without having to worry about Google not being able to index because the I-frame is converted into a readable code.
This is a great resource on video SEO. Because I can tell you using Frist hand by using this method it will work.
https://www.distilled.net/blog/video/video-seo-tactics-to-get-ranked/
Sorry I did not explain more in my first response.
Tom
-
They all sort of help, but basically just reconfirms what's out there... nobody seems to know for sure. It seems iframes sometimes get crawled but sometimes not. For Mobile, Google recommends iframes but doesn't say specifically that they get crawled and then elsewhere they say there's limited support for them.
It's frustrating Google can't just provide clear guidance on the subject.
While the answer might be Vzaar or Wistia, they have drawbacks and there are times where YouTube is the better choice even if you use one of the other services. So understanding the best way to embed them seems important.
-
Hi Jim!
Do any of these responses help?
-
Google actually can crawl iframes, but the support is limited. Try indexing it with robots.txt or add the URL of the frame you'd like to have crawled in Google Webmaster Tools. Since an iframe is basically an HTML document inside an HTML document, it's not going to crawl the whole page together with the iframe, making its SEO value lower than if it were outside the iframe. A good tactic is to also have content surrounding the iframe on page that describes what is inside the iframe.
And since we're on the topic of videos inside iframes, make sure you have transcripts for it. Google does use those as well as deaf users, so you're doing a good turn for your client and for those with disabilities.
But to answer the root of your question, you're right we don't actually know if Google has a system setup to specifically make it easier to crawl Youtube videos inside iframes. As transparent as Google has been this past year they're still pretty mysterious overall.
-
iframes do not get crawled but there are other ways or Google to see videos that link back to your site Moz uses Wistia.com they are spectacular and their embed code and site map make them easily findable
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
-
Will Google crawl and rank our ReactJS website content?
We have 250+ products dynamically inserted and sorted on our site daily (more specifically our homepage... yes, it's a long page). Our dev team would like to explore rendering the page server-side using ReactJS. We currently use a CDN to cache all the content, which of course we would like to continue using. SO... will Google be able to crawl that content? We've read some articles with different ideas (including prerendering): http://andrewhfarmer.com/react-seo/
Technical SEO | | Jane.com
http://www.seoskeptic.com/json-ld-big-day-at-google/ If we were to only load the schema important to the page (like product title, image, price, description, etc.) from the server and then let the client render the remaining content (comments, suggested products, etc.), would that go against best practices? It seems like that might be seen as showing the googlebot 1 version and showing the site visitor a different (more complete) version.0 -
Thousands of links coming from an iframe
We have an iframed calculator on one website (www.renewablesguide.co.uk) which has a text link to another of our websites (www.solarguide.co.uk) which is where the calculator originates. We allow other sites to embed the calculator which gives us the benefit of a followed link back to our site. However in the case of renewablesguide (which we own) we've added a tab to the calculator on every page which GWT shows up as 24 000 links from this site hitting the Solar Guide homepage. As the link is held within an iframe would this amount of links be seen as spammy?
Technical SEO | | holmesmedia0 -
What the hell that iframe is doing?
I have a competitor using a technique I don't understand. But which seems to work. Basically in the homepage has a <noscript>area with a bunch of internal links to pages like:</p> <ul> <li><a href="foo.com/keyword1">keyword1</a></li> <li><a href="foo.com/keyword2">keyword2</a></li> <li><a href="foo.com/keyword3">keyword3</a></li> </ul> <p>Inside these pages there's an iframe with the site homepage url as source, within the iframe tag there's some text (less than 100 words) with some emphasis on the keyword and a link back to the home using keyword as anchor text.</p> <p>All the pages are in the sitemap and indexed, and when you open one you are shown that page (no 301 redirect).</p> <p>Technically those are not doorway pages, because there's no 301.</p> <p>The website has a much weaker backlink profile than others, but does rank pretty well with better positions for those keywords, for many is the TOP 1 (with the url of the homepage, not the iframed pages).</p> <p>And I don't understand why. I understand the usage of the iframe to have the same content as the home page, but without being detect as duplicate content.</p> <p>And I can guess google crawler does crawl the <noscript> links follow them and.... And since the page is basically empty should not do much. The url of the page with the iframe includes the keyword, but doesn't sounds like such a powerful signal to be sent back the homepage thanks to that link contained within the iframe tags.</p> <p><strong>Does anyone have any idea why it works?</strong></p></noscript>
Technical SEO | | max.favilli1 -
Bogus Crawl Errors in Webmaster Tools?
I am suddenly seeing a ton of crawl errors in webmaster tools. Almost all of them are URL links coming from scraper sites.that I do not own. Do you see these in your Webmaster Tools account? Do you mark them as "fixed" if they are on a scraper site? There are waaaay too many of these to make redirects. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | EGOL0 -
How do I get Update Date in SERP snippets?
How do I get Update Date in SERP snippets as opposed to the Date Created?
Technical SEO | | Travis-W1 -
Http VS https and google crawl and indexing ?
Is it true that https pages are not crawled and indexed by Google and other search engines as well as http pages?
Technical SEO | | sherohass0 -
Links from Youtube Channel
I stumbled across this blog post: http://garyreid.com/youtube-removes-nofollow/ and also this one : http://www.kevin-barnes.com/youtube-secret-authority-loophole/ which talks about no-follow links from your Youtube Channel Page. We've setup a Youtube channel, and have begun updating it regularly, however the link appears to be a redirect-type link -presumably this means no link juice is passed? The code of the link on our Youtube channel: http://www.pretavoir.co.uk The second blog mentions building PA on your Youtube channel by commenting on other videos which then links back to your channel page - if that juice can't go to your site, then I assume the technique is of limited use? Apart from boosting your Youtube Channel's rankings of course, which I guess can't hurt.
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
How can I get unimportant pages out of Google?
Hi Guys, I have a (newbie) question, untill recently I didn't had my robot.txt written properly so Google indexed around 1900 pages of my site, but only 380 pages are real pages, the rest are all /tag/ or /comment/ pages from my blog. I now have setup the sitemap and the robot.txt properly but how can I get the other pages out of Google? Is there a trick or will it just take a little time for Google to take out the pages? Thanks! Ramon
Technical SEO | | DennisForte0