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
-
Duplicate Content from long Site Title
Hello! I have a number of "Duplicate Title Errors" as my website has a long Site Title: Planit NZ: New Zealand Tours, Bus Passes & Travel Planning. Am I better off with a short title that is simply my website/business name: Planit NZ My thought was adding some keywords might help with my rankings. Thanks Matt
Technical SEO | | mkyhnn0 -
Handling of Duplicate Content
I just recently signed and joined the moz.com system. During the initial report for our web site it shows we have lots of duplicate content. The web site is real estate based and we are loading IDX listings from other brokerages into our site. If though these listings look alike, they are not. Each has their own photos, description and addresses. So why are they appear as duplicates – I would assume that they are all too closely related. Lots for Sale primarily – and it looks like lazy agents have 4 or 5 lots and input the description the same. Unfortunately for us, part of the IDX agreement is that you cannot pick and choose which listings to load and you cannot change the content. You are either all in or you cannot use the system. How should one manage duplicate content like this? Or should we ignore it? Out of 1500+ listings on our web site it shows 40 of them are duplicates.
Technical SEO | | TIM_DOTCOM0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Titles from Weebly Blog
Anyone familiar with Weebly that can offer some suggestions? I ran a crawl diagnostics on my site and have some high priority issues that appear to stem from Weebly Blog posts. There are several of them and it appears that the post is being counted as "page content" on the main blog feed and then again when it is tagged to a category. I hope this makes sense, I am new to SEO and this is really confusing. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CRMI0 -
Duplicate Content Reports
Hi Dupe content reports for a new client are sjhowing very high numbers (8000+) main of them seem to be for sign in, register, & login type pages, is this a scenario where best course of action to resolve is likely to be via the parameter handling tool in GWT ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, we need some help on resolving this duplicate content issue,. We have redirected both domains to this magento website. I guess now Google considered this as duplicate content. Our client wants both domain name to go to the same magento store. What is the safe way of letting Google know these are same company? Or this is not ideal to do this? thanks
Technical SEO | | solution.advisor0 -
Getting rid of duplicate content with rel=canonical
This may sound like a stupid question, however it's important that I get this 100% straight. A new client has nearly 6k duplicate page titles / descriptions. To cut a long story short, this is mostly the same page (or rather a set of pages), however every time Google visits these pages they get a different URL. Hence the astronomical number of duplicate page titles and descriptions. Now the easiest way to fix this looks like canonical linking. However, I want to be absolutely 100% sure that Google will then recognise that there is no duplicate content on the site. Ideally I'd like to 301 but the developers say this isn't possible, so I'm really hoping the canonical will do the job. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RiceMedia0 -
Duplicate Content and Canonical use
We have a pagination issue, which the developers seem reluctant (or incapable) to fix whereby we have 3 of the same page (slightly differing URLs) coming up in different pages in the archived article index. The indexing convention was very poorly thought up by the developers and has left us with the same article on, for example, page 1, 2 and 3 of the article index, hence the duplications. Is this a clear cut case of using a canonical tag? Quite concerned this is going to have a negative impact on ranking, of course. Cheers Martin
Technical SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Duplicate content check picking up weird urls
Hi everyone, I love the duplicate content feature; we have a lot of duplicate content issues due to the way our site is structured. So, we're working on them. However, I'm not fully understanding the results. For example, say I have an article on breast cancer symptoms. It shows up as duplicate content, by having two urls that point to the exact same page. http://www.healthchoices.ca/articles/breast cancer symptoms and http://www.healthchoices.ca/somerandomstringofcode. I fully understand why that is duplicate content. I am not sure about this though, it picks up the same url twice and calls it duplicate content. For example, saying that http://www.healthchoices.ca/dr.-so-and-so and http://www.healthchoices.ca/dr.-so-and-so is duplicate...however is this not the same page? Is there something I'm missing? Many of the URL's are identical. Thanks, Erin
Technical SEO | | erinhealthchoices0