Using video transcripts v captions and avoiding duplicate content?
-
Part 1: After editing a You Tube transcript, I typically re-upload as a caption file (with time codes)...for SEO does it matter whether you upload as a transcript v. captions? Is one better than the other?
Part 2: If you upload a transcript (or caption) to YouTube, then post that video/transcript in your blog, wouldn't you get pinged for duplicate content?
-
Sigh of relief. Thanks, Phil!
-
Hi Jennifer,
In short - the answer to both your questions is No. What you're doing is absolutely fine
With YouTube Closed captions - you can upload multiple files - covering multiple languages/descriptive transcripts/speech transcripts. All sorts if you really want to. There is no difference from an SEO perspective between the "captions" model with timecodes or simply the text "transcript". Both are ultimately read like copy text for the video.
The YouTube video embed on an external site is read as an independent media element with the uploaded transcript file as meta-data applied to that media. Even if the on-page copy contains the identical text, it appears as a different form to the engines and is valuable to users as well - there is no "duplicate content" risk, as the content is presented in totally different formats.
I would continue with what you're currently doing - which sounds good :).
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
-
International SEO And Duplicate Content Within The Same Language
Hello, Currently, we have a .com English website serving an international clientele. As is the case we do not currently target any countries in Google Search Console. However, the UK is an important market for us and we are seeing very low traffic (almost entirely US). We would like to increase visibility in the UK, but currently for English speakers only. My question is this - would geo-targeting a subfolder have a positive impact on visibility/rankings or would it create a duplicate content issue if both pieces of content are in English? My plan was: 1. Create a geo-targeted subfolder (website.com/uk/) that copies our website (we currently cannot create new unique content) 2. Go into GSC and geo-target the folder to the UK 3. Add the following to the /uk/ page to try to negate duplicate issues. Additionally, I can add a rel=canonical tag if suggested, I just worry as an already international site this will create competition between pages However, as we are currently only targeting a location and not the language at this very specific point, would adding a ccTLD be advised instead? The threat of duplicate content worries me less here as this is a topic Matt Cutts has addressed and said is not an issue. I prefer the subfolder method as to ccTLD's, because it allows for more scalability, as in the future I would like to target other countries and languages. Ultimately right now, the goal is to increase UK traffic. Outside of UK backlinks, would any of the above URL geo-targeting help drive traffic? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Duplicate content issue on Magento platform
We have a lot of duplicate pages (600 urls) on our site (total urls 800) built on the Magento e-commerce platform. We have the same products in a number of different categories that make it easy for people to choose which product suits their needs. If we enable the canonical fix in Magento will it dramatically reduce the number of pages that are indexed. Surely with more pages indexed (even though they are duplicates) we get more search results visibility. I'm new to this particular SEO issue. What do the SEO community have to say on this matter. Do we go ahead with the canonical fix or leave it?
Technical SEO | | PeterDavies0 -
Do mobile and desktop sites that pull content from the same source count as duplicate content?
We are about to launch a mobile site that pulls content from the same CMS, including metadata. They both have different top-level domains, however (www.abcd.com and www.m.abcd.com). How will this affect us in terms of search engine ranking?
Technical SEO | | ovenbird0 -
Is this duplicate content?
All the pages have same information but content is little bit different, is this low quality and considered as duplicate content? I only trying to make services pages for each city, any other way for doing this. http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-pennsylvania/
Technical SEO | | JordanBrown
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-new-york/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-new-jersey/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-connecticut/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-maryland/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-massachusetts/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-philadelphia/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-new-york-city/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-baltimore/
http://www.progressivehealthofpa.com/brain-injury-rehabilitation-boston/0 -
Duplicated content in news portal: should we use noindex?
Hello, We have a news portal, and like other newspapers we have our own content and content from other contributors. Both our content and our contributors content can be found in other websites (we sell our content and they give theirs to us). In this regard, everything seems to work fine from the business and users perspective. The problem is that this means duplicated content... so my question is: "Should we add the noindex,nofollow" tag to these articles? Notice that there might be hundreds of articles everyday, something like a 1/3 of the website. I checked one newspaper which uses news from agencies, but they seem not to use any noindex tag. Not sure what others do. I would appreciate any opinion on that.
Technical SEO | | forex-websites0 -
External video content in iframe
Hi, On our site we have a lot of video content. The player is hosted by a third party so we are using an iframe to include the content on our site. The problem is that the content it self (on the third party domain) is shown in the google result. My question is: Can we ask the third party to disallow the content from indexing in their robots.txt or will that also affect our own use of the video content? For example we use video-sitemaps to include the videos in Google video search (the sitemap links to the videos on our own domain, but we are still using iframes on the pages to collect the content from the third party domain that will then be blocked by robots.txt). I hope you understand what I mean... Any suggestions? Thanks a lot!
Technical SEO | | Googleankan0 -
Duplicate content problem from an index.php file
Hi One of my sites is flagging a duplicate content problem which is affecting the search rankings. The duplicate problem is caused by http://www.mydomain.com/index.php which has a page rank of 26 How can I sort the duplicate content problem, as the main page should just be http://www.mydomain.com which has a page rank of 42 and is the stronger page with stronger links etc Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Duplicate content domains ranking successfully
I have a project with 8 domains and each domain is showing the same content (including site structure) and still all sites do rank. When I search for a specific word-string in google it lists me all 8 domains. Do you have an explanation, why Google doesn't filter those URLs to just one URL instead of 8 with the same content?
Technical SEO | | kenbrother0