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.
-
That sounds like a nice idea and will work nicely for users - you'll just need to consider whether you would rather the YouTube videos or the pages on your site rank for the targeted keywords and optimise everything accordingly. There aren't any duplicate content risks there.
-
What I meant by "getting credit" is that we are producing these videos and I would like them to be seen as part of the content of my site. On the site, these videos would typically be on a "tips" page with some surrounding text, etc. On youtube, they obviously are a video placed on my youtube channel. The goal on the web site is to build a rich collection of tips and information that would be of value to our customers. On youtube, the videos alone would be of value and could be socialized, etc, with a site overlay.
-
Hey,
So, the situation is relatively convoluted and there isn't an absolute right answer to what best practice will be, but hopefully I can offer you some useful advice.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "credit" regarding YouTube videos but I assume you mean rich snippets? In this case, it is indeed true that Google don't often give out video rich snippets for embedded YouTube videos, but instead normally just provide a video result that links to the main YouTube domain - however, within the last couple of weeks they have visibly begun to occasionally offer some more rich snippets for embedded YT videos, but only for high authority blogs and where the blog provides a great deal of supporting content.
That said, you should still summit a video sitemap for any embed YT videos you put up, as you are giving google good metadata about your site that helps them to crawl it better. While you may not get the rich snippet, that does not nullify the value of the sitemap.
I'm not quite sure whether in your proposal you plan to host the versions of the videos on your own site with a third party or with YouTube? If it's the latter and you're simply proposing that the metadata on your page focus's on different terms than the YT video itself, then I would advice against it. In this instance, you almost certainly won't get a rich snippet, as in Googles eyes the embedded video will be broadlyl irrelevant to the focus of the rest of the page. However, having versions on your site hosted with a third party i.e wistia (or self hosted) and then uploading the content to YouTube, essentially as a duplicate, but targeting a different term - this can work. Whether its a good idea or not really depends on the content itself and the audience base the site has.
Another point to recommend is that you should never put promotional or commercially focused content on YouTube - always host that yourself or with a secure third party solution. The user engagement metrics on YouTube are critical in determining whether you will rank both on YT and on Google and if the videos appear algorithmically uninteresting - then your rankings will suffer. Only put content on YouTube that users who find the videos through searching on YouTube will want to watch. How-tos and funny content are great, but stay clear of product information or blatant advertising (unless you are doing PPC YouTube advertising).
Hope that's useful, let me know if you have further questions.
Phil.
Written on my iPad, on a train, so sorry for any typos!
-
I highly doubt you'll get popped for duplicate content because content is going to be on "your" site and the other content is going to be on "youtubes" site. if you are looking to get traffic from YouTube and that's your marketing strategy, that's fine. If not, then sign up for Vimeo Pro: http://vimeo.com/pro
SeoMoz uses Wisita, but I think it's too much.
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
-
How is your site holding up post Penguin 4.0 roll out?
Hi team I was reading an article this morning from Barry Schwartz at SERoundtable about the impact of Penguin 4.0 and how webmasters are reporting minimal effects since launch. There was another article posted this morning about how the roll out may have began before the launch date, which would make sense as MozCast was reporting high temperatures leading up to Friday, specifically 9/12 to 9/15. I was wondering how everyone's traffic / rankings are performing after news broke on Friday, 9/23? Were you see fluctuations before that? What are you focusing on most now that Penguin 4.0 has launched? I understand we are a few days in and this is a real time / ongoing rollout, but I would be interested to hear what everyone has been seeing so far, if anything! Hope you all are doing well and I'm looking forward to hearing from you! Good luck!
Algorithm Updates | | PatrickDelehanty
P0 -
Having 2 domains with same name - Impact on SEO
Hi AllAs we still dwindle with the rankings not coming in line with the efforts.I have a question: We have 2 websites 1. http://www.example.com/ (which lost traffic and rank in Jan 2013). So we assumed that it was due to some penguin penalty. So we worked on disavow extra but nothing actually helped.Though there was no manual penalty mentioned in the GWT. Frustrated with this we thought of having another website 6 months back: 2. https://example.org/ - we did all the right things and by the book. But we are not seeing ranking here too. We did backlink analysis on all competitors and worked on only quality links they had. So all our links are highly highly relevant. But still the ranks are not moving beyond third page...in fact they moved to 6-7 page in last 2-3 days. Please suggest .. 1. is it due to same name of domain (our brand name) causing the issue. If yes should we go for 302 or 301 redirect to save ourselves from any penalty that our last website may have got. We can not leave that name unattended as our cataloges etc have that website mentioned. i will expect a scientific reply here not gut feeling please. 2. Is it to do with .org domain extension that it should not be with commercial organizations like us Kindly reply at the earliest Regards Aman
Algorithm Updates | | Aman_1230 -
With regards to SEO is it good or bad to remove all the old events from our website?
Our website sells tickets for various events across the UK, we do have a LOT of old event pages on our website which simply say SOLD OUT. What is the best practice? Should these event pages be removed and a 301 redirect added to redirect to the home page? Or should these pages remain in tact with simply SOLD OUT on the page?
Algorithm Updates | | Alexogilvie0 -
Is My SEO Strategy Doomed?
Hi Mozzers, Second time poster here and still a major rookie with SEO. I run the website http://OrangeOctop.us/, it provides winning tips for video games such as FIFA, NBA 2K, NHL. All of the tips are written by experts and professional gamers. The site has been trying to rank for the term "NHL 14 Tips". To give you some more background info, the actual game, NHL 14, does not come out for another two weeks. I was just being proactive with trying to rank for a term that will be popular in the future. My Wordpress category page, http://orangeoctop.us/nhl14-tips/, ranked as high as #5 for "NHL 14 Tips", but it seems that as it gets closer to the game's release date, I get pushed further down the google rankings. In the most recent Moz crawl, my site just dropped 11 spots. Any recommendations would be appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | orangeoctop.us0 -
Yahoo & Bing algorithm changes?
We have noticed that several of our clients have been falling fairly significantly in the rankings in both Yahoo and Bing in recent weeks. Do you know if they have made any algorithm changes lately, and if so, do you have any indication of what changes may have been made?
Algorithm Updates | | GregWalt0 -
Bing SEO?
I've put in a lot of time on my site to make sure it is full of good relevent content and has a healthy back link profile. I rank well on google but not on Bing. How do I go about optimizing my site for Bing and what does Bing look for that makes them rank sites differnetly than google? Also what other search engines should I be looking to optimize for? As a note I am a Realtor with a Real Estate website.
Algorithm Updates | | bronxpad0 -
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 -
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