Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Video SEO - Why are my videos not being indexed?
-
Hello All,
I work on a site that has a lot of videos. The trouble is none of them are ranking.
Here is an example of a page with a video on.
If you click the play button you will see
But none of these videos are being indexed, as you can see here.
Is it because these videos are just mp4 files, rather than being embedded players (like SEOmoz use for instance)?
Would embedding videos through Viddler / Wistia / Youtube etc help?
Or is there some other issue at work here?
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Rich
-
Sounds good Rich!
Sorry, i couldn't find the video sitemap! Definitely add that to the robots.txt file as well (assuming it's a separate sitemap).
Yeah - Google don't like the olde multiple videos per page - can only include the one.
Let me know how you get on - i'm an ale man all the way :).
Cheers,
Phil
-
Hi Rob Phil (it's almost 5:30),
Thanks for such a detailed answer.
Off the bat we are going to fix points 2 & 3 (redoing the video delivery is a not feasible at this point in time) and see how that fixes us up.
We do have a video sitemap but it is structured to have multiple videos per <loc>, so think this is not helping!</loc>
If fixing these points don't help then we will look at the video player.
Anyways, thanks again... and are you a larger or ale drinker?
Rich
-
Following up on my point - If you want to move away from using your own player - then Wistia or Viddler etc is a totally acceptable solution. It's not neccessary - as there are lots of good free video players out there you can use (rather than a paid solution), but it would be a fine way of sorting out the current problems with the JS and lightboxes.
Don't use YouTube though - as any video results will link back to YT - not your domain.
-
Hey Rich,
So there's a few problems here which i think are preventing your videos from being indexed.
- The main one is around your bespoke video player and the Javascript / Lightbox delivery - which, while potentially elegant from a users perspective, isn't great for Google. Currently the flash video player is only being delivered by a JS trigger and Google probably aren't picking it up.
- You have more than one video on each page (and tons of duplicate videos) - All the "play product video" links at the bottom of the page are more lightboxes, which means you have 34 .mp4 files visible within the page source. Therefore, which video should google rank for the page?! It's not clear and with each video also replicated across many pages, it becomes a minefield for the Robots to navigate.
- No Video XML sitemap
To get things fixed, i suggest you implement either a static flash player file within the base HTML (.swf or .flv) or do the whole thing with HTML5 video elements and try and find a way to "reveal" the video file without using lightboxes or JS. (i would plump for the latter).
You should also fix the "play video" links throughout the rest of the page to static HTML links - rather than lightboxes with more videos.
Lastly, of course, submit an XML video Sitemap. He's an example for the page you included - replicate this for the rest of your pages.
<loc>www.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/furniture/rustic-solid-oak-4-drawer-coffee-table/1149.html</loc>
video:thumbnail_lochttp://static.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/media/gbu0/prod350/rus18-4f0f1c68245c6.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
video:titleRustic Solid Oak 4 Drawer</video:title>
video:descriptionThe Rustic Oak Four Drawer Coffee Table features a traditional farmhouse styling with ample storage space</video:description></video:description>
video:content_lochttp://video.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/rustic/Rustic-Solid-Oak-4-Drawer-Coffee-Table.mp4</video:content_loc>
video:duration56</video:duration>
video:publication_date2012-03-14T18:30:15+00:00</video:publication_date>
video:family_friendlyyes</video:family_friendly>
video:tagSolid Oak 4 Drawer</video:tag>
video:liveno</video:live>
If you change all that and it still doesn't work - let me know.
If it does work, you owe me a beer
All the best,
Phil
-
Hi Rich
Not sure if you done this yet but have you looked at adding the videos to your website map ?
There is a great post in Google Webmaster section about how to add videos to your sitemap so that search engines can know more about the videos and this may lead to them being indexed.
The link to the post is http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472
Hope it helps.
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
-
Why are my blog slideshow images not indexed?
I'm managing a design blog hosted on WordPress. Each "design project" article includes a slideshow with additional images (and captions) for the project - these are images and text not found in the article itself. Every slide has the same page path as the article, but a different query param at the end. So if the article is /article the first slide would be /article?slide=1 for example. I'm having two issues: The slideshow images don't seem to be getting indexed. Screaming Frog reports duplicate meta descriptions and title tags for each slideshow page (same meta as article). I want to do what's best overall from an SEO perspective. Having the slideshow images show in Google image search is a must. And having the captions indexed might help too? But I want the Google image results linking to the article and not the individual slideshow pages. And I don't want duplicate meta issues. What's the best thing to do? Submit a sitemap that lists both article and slideshow images? "Rel canonical" the param'd slideshow urls to the base article url (not sure this makes total sense, since slide content is different from the article)? Get rid of slideshow altogether and put images in body? Some combo of these? Hopefully this makes sense. Any thoughts appreciated!
Image & Video Optimization | | theoHP0 -
Moving Images to Subdomain: SEO Impacts
For sever work- load enhancements we are planning to move our images to a sub-domain. so the files would be located at something like images.domain.com Rather than domain.com/images/ We are a large Ecommerce site so we have a lot of images. These will be self hosted so we are not using a CDN. I'm hoping someone has done the same and if there were any steps they had wished they had taken before making the move/ if they noticed any traffic impacts things like that.
Image & Video Optimization | | RMATVMC0 -
Should YouTube videos be added too our sitemap
Our company recently started making videos and posting them on our YouTube channel. Should we include the YouTube videos to our sitemap for our main domain? Thanks,
Image & Video Optimization | | WebRiverGroup0 -
Local SEO: Links with the citations so should I slow down?
Hello, There seems to be some nofollow and dofollow links building as I add structured citations. Is this a reason to slow down the building citation process if you want the links to count? Do they help organic SEO?
Image & Video Optimization | | BobGW0 -
What is the best way to include video transcripts on your pages?
I just posted a question as a comment on this blog post (http://www.audiotranscription.org/6-reasons-you-need-to-have-your-sites-videos-transcribed/comment-page-1/#comment-4311) and realized I probably should have asked the question here because it is really SEO-related. We are in the process of transcribing all of our videos. Can you someone recommend how best to post the transcript file on our product pages? For example, here's a product page that has a video review on it: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/behringer-x32-digital-mixing-system. Would it be best to post a link to the transcript file or insert the iframe transcript file from DotSub.com (in that case wouldn't DotSub.com be getting credit for our original content?) or, should we just let our captions on the YouTube stream from there (which is what's happening right now)? Will Google still crawl the transcript if the only place it's available is on YouTube? If so, doesn't YouTube get credited for that content, and not our site? Even if we do post a trascript on the page, if it appeared at YouTube first, wouldn't YouTube get credit for the original version? We want credit for that content...just not sure how to get it? I understand that moving to Wistia.com would probably solve most of these issues. What I'm trying to figure out is how best to handle new transcripts for existing videos over at YouTube?
Image & Video Optimization | | danatanseo0 -
Local SEO: How to optimize for multiple cities on website
Hi, I couldn't find any reference to this, so if the answer is already here, I would appreciate a link to the answer. That said, my question is this: When a local business services a large geographic area, I wanted to know how to optimize for the multiple towns? I already have the main city in my title tags, but there are at least 40 areas that surround this town. Should I have a "Services Area" page, and place all the towns there, or should they all be in the footer? I saw this one guy - in the same niche who put all the towns in his meta keyword section - but I think that's incorrect, especially since Google doesn't look at that particular meta tag. Any help would be appreciated.
Image & Video Optimization | | jayestovall1 -
Yext vs Localeze vs UBL for Local SEO
Which of these services is the best? Does anyone have experience with all three?
Image & Video Optimization | | nicole.healthline2 -
Local SEO address question - adding a suite number for shared address for office building
Hi, I have a client that has an address that is shared for a few different businesses in the holistic health field. My client is a chiropractor. There is an eye doctor, massage therapist and acupuncturist aslo sharing the same address. It's a subburban setting with two buildings all sharing one address. In the interest of preventing any merged listings down the road, I recently added un unofficial suite number to his website and Google places business listing. I also did this for all of his online directory listings, and for Bing and Yahoo as well. Did I do the right thing here? It seems to be having a positive impact on his local SEO as far as I can tell. Or at least there has not been any negative impact in the last 6 months Your thoughts?
Image & Video Optimization | | MozMan20