Video hosting - SEO
-
Hi,
We host all of our videos on You Tube and use embedded links to display on our site.
When people search keywords related to our videos they are linking back to You Tube through SERPs. Is there a way link SERPs to websites instead of You Tube?
Any advice would be appreciated.
Sean
-
Hi Donald,
As others have mentioned, it's normally very difficult to get a rich snippet result off the back of an embedded YouTube video, which means your best bet will probably be to take the vids down from YouTube and host them yourself or with a third party provider.
I created a guide last week which gives you step by step instructions for getting your own domain ranking for a video - if you follow those pointers then you should have no problem getting the rich snippets in the SERPs.
Any questions/confusions, please do let me know.
Cheers,
Phil
-
Hi Amie,
Thanks for your response. Yeah, we get a lot of comments from hungry viewers on You Tube. Unfortunately, we don't do delivery to the States though!
I actually saw a mention of being able to use video sitemaps to link SERPs on this Whiteboard Friday video http://www.seomoz.org/blog/video-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday-11080#jtc173625 but didn't see anything else on how to do it or if you are still able to do it. Wondered if there is a tag or something that I can add to the iframe to enable this.
Yes we do need to work on the tags and descriptions of our videos, unfortunately it's one of these things that is on my to do list but I never round to doing. Will definitely get working on adding links to the site from the videos!
Thanks again.
Sean -
Not an unusual problem. YouTube is a naturally popular site and Google likes to showcase it in the SERPs when there's something relevant.
As Amie said, you need to link to your site in the video description. You're missing out on potential traffic.
As convenient as YouTube is, maybe consider hosting the videos yourself? Amazon S3/Cloudfront, for instance, is fairly cheap and speedy enough to serve videos to your visitors. It neatly avoids having the YouTube problem but it means a lot more work to get your videos ranked (writing content, transcribing, etc). You might want to check out how to do some video SEO if you go this route.
-
Hey Sean,
First... I'm insanely hungry now from watching your videos! Second, I'm wondering why you don't have a link in your Youtube videos back to your site. Remember that YouTube is a powerful search engine itself so if I were you I would use those videos for double duty. Optimize them and make sure there is a link back to your site so the traffic comes from You Tube in addition to your site.
That might also solve your problem of the YouTube video landing in search. I would spruce up the description so that it appeals both to people coming from your site and from YouTube.
Full Disclosure: I haven't used Youtube in 11 months so they might have changed their protocol...
Unfortunately, I don't think you are going to be able to switch out your video for a site on the SERPs - but I could be wrong. I'll be looking forward to one of our amazing Mozzers to answer this more directly. In the meantime, I hope that what I shared will at least help a little
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
-
Does Autoplay video effect SEO?
I'm trying to find out if autoplay videos (muted) on the homepage effect seo in anyway? Currently our site ranks around position four on the first page, but we have noticed one competitor we monitor have long auto playing videos on their sites and were wondering if they are a good or bad factor? Any info you would like to share would be great. Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | 5TW0 -
How to embed a video in our product image
Hi We use bigcommerce and want to add a video to each product . We want to add a video link in the corner of the product image and have the video play when this tab is clicked. Can anyone tell us how to do this Regards
Image & Video Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
Videos - Host on our Site or YouTube or Both
Hi We are redesigning our site and going to post how to videos on some of our product pages.
Image & Video Optimization | | klbklb90015
For SEO purposes I want to post the videos on our site with a video transcription either self hosting or through Wistia. Can we also post the same videos on YouTube or is that duplicate content and will we get hurt somehow? Thanks.0 -
Hosting Video both on YouTube AND Independently on Site?
I've got a pretty good handle on the pros / cons of hosting on videos on a free service like YouTube vs. hosting them independently with something like Wistia. But one question I've never heard answered is "Why not host the same video both ways?" Why wouldn't I publish a video to YouTube (to get the exposure and better chance to rank) and then also host the same video independently on my site with Wistia (to get a second listing in the SERPs, as well as a thumbnail that links to my site)? Is this seen as a spammy practice? Duplicate content? Would love to hear your thoughts on this as it's something that seems to potentially be a win-win, but haven't heard it discussed. Thanks!
Image & Video Optimization | | AndrewY0 -
Duplicate Video within site
My questions is about duplicate video content. I haven't been able to get a clear understanding from reading the previous threads. We are hosting our videos with Vimeo and embedding into our site. I want to embed them in 2 locations - on our features page with Java (Can be seen here http://simpletexting.com/features/). I also want to embed them in our resource section so that we can link to them directly. I am wondering what the best way to do this for SEO and whether there is a chance that google will penalize us for duplicate content? If leave out the videos on the features page in the XML sitemap, does that address the problem? There are 2 threads I saw on the topic and they have somewhat conflicting opinion from the same person. http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-video-content-question --Duplicate video on the same site is not a problem http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-video-onsite-how-do-you-treat-this-in-sitemap -- Duplicate videos are a problem as google can recognize them as such due to audio wave patterns, video length etc. Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | SimpleTexting0 -
How much does a link from a YouTube video to a site affect its pagerank?
How much does a link from a YouTube video to a site affect its pagerank?
Image & Video Optimization | | JLAW0 -
Image SEO - Does having multiple sites using same image help?
I'd assume that if many websites reference the same image on a server that this image would rank higher in image results than a similar image that is only used on 1 website.I have yet to do any testing with this to be certain, but how important does this factor seem to be in regards to image SEO?
Image & Video Optimization | | art-boy0