Video XML Sitemap
-
I've been recently been information by our dev team that we are not allowed legally to make our raw video files available in a video XML sitemap...This is one of the required tags. Has anyone run into a similar situation and has figured out a way around it?
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Margarita
-
This is exactly what I needed! Thank you!!!!
-
Thank you so much, Phil. That's correct, the files are already in .mp4 format. Your answer below is perfect. I provided examples of big publishers who have no problem sharing their video locations. We will see how it goes! Just another battle as an in-house SEO. Thanks again!
-Margarita
-
I don't think Margarita means the "unrendered" files, but rather the video files used within the embedded player - which will be .mp4 or .flv or .mov etc. References to these files are required as part of a video sitemap as a video:content_locelement. </video:content_loc>
-
Hi Margarita,
So - firstly, I can't quite understand the logic behind your Dev teams concerns here - as anyone knowledgable enough to find your video sitemap and pull the file URL from there will also be knowledgeable enough to look through your source code and rip the video file through the embedded player. If somebody really wants to download your content, they will - and a video sitemap listing the URLs of the mp4/mov files isn't going to be advertisment for people to do this.
If, in another attempt to prevent piracy, the dev teams are delivering the video content dynamically via JS - you're going to face another issue as the videos may not get indexed.
However, all that said... there is a way round this which may pacify your dev teams and still get the rich snippet results you're after - and that is including a video:player_locelement in the sitemap, rather than a video:content_locelement. video:player_locshould point to a specific embedded player for a specific video -e.g. an .swf flash file or a dynamic HTML5 player e.g. http://player.vimeo.com/video/36862925.</video:player_loc></video:content_loc></video:player_loc>
This will prevent users from finding the original video files outside the context of the embedded player, but i should add that it's not an effective block against piracy.
I hope that's useful, let me know if you have any more questions.
Cheers,
Phil.
-
" raw video files" as in pre- rendered?
- Illegal? No
- Impractical? Yes
Sounds like your dev team is lazy. Tell them to convert to videos to .mp4 and go from there.
-
nope, those raw files exist. They don't want to share them with the public. Legally is the only answer I got...I think it has to do in part with them being afraid of people trying to download the videos.
-
What do they mean legally? Maybe they mean technically can't generate them, or they are over the 50mrg limit or something like that according to Google's rules?
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
-
Our subdomain hosts content that can not be optimized (static videos) - should I de-index it?
We host static tours on a subdomain that points to the video tour host. I can not add meta or optimize any of these video pages and there are thousands. Should I de-index the entire subdomain? I am seeing errors for no meta, dup content etc in MOZ reporting. If yes, do I add the Disallow: /subdomain.root.nl/ to the primary domain's website/CMS or in DNS records ? Our web company is saying the no follow needs to be added in DNS but I feel like it should be added to the robots.txt file if SERP's are going to acknowledge the sub is no longer to be crawled and the primary is no longer to be penalized. Thank you so much in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masonmorse0 -
Old sitemaps after site migration.
Hi, I was wondering if it's safe to remove all the sitemaps from the old site in search console? It's been 3 months since site migration from http://sitea.com (301 redirected) to http://siteb.com. Therefore, can I delete the old sitemap from the http://sitea.com from search console? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
SITEMAP - Does <changefreq>and <image:title>have any apreciable effect?</image:title></changefreq>
Hi everyone. It was hard to find some actual evidence that some of the atributes to be declared in a sitemap have some real impact.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gaston Riera
Particularly, im interested in these two: <changefreq></changefreq> and**image:title</image:title>** I've used them in a few cases just to check their effect and couldnt see any.
Do you have any experience with these? Or any other atribute that might be helpful, in order to create a more accurate and effective sitemap? Also, this could be a great topic to create a new Moz Blog post, the one about sitemap is 8years old.0 -
Page Count in Webmaster Tools Index Status Versus Page Count in Webmaster Tools Sitemap
Greeting MOZ Community: I run www.nyc-officespace-leader.com, a real estate website in New York City. The page count in Google Webmaster Tools Index status for our site is 850. The page count in our Webmaster Tools Sitemap is 637. Why is there a discrepancy between the two? What does the Google Webmaster Tools Index represent? If we filed a removal request for pages we did not want indexed, will these pages still show in the Google Webmaster Tools page count despite the fact that they no longer display in search results? The number of pages displayed in our Google Webmaster Tools Index remains at about 850 despite the removal request. Before a site upgrade in June the number of URLs in the Google Webmaster Tools Index and Google Webmaster Site Map were almost the same. I am concerned that page bloat has something to do with a recent drop in ranking. Thanks everyone!! Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Proper sitemap update frequency
I have 12 sitemaps submitted to Google. After about a week, Google is about 50% of the way through crawling each one. In the past week I've created many more pages. Should I wait until Google is 100% complete with my original sitemaps or can I just go ahead and refresh them? When I refresh the original files will have different URLs.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
If I only Link to Page via Sitemap, can it still get indexed?
Hi there! I am creating a ton of content for specific geographies. Is it possible for these pages to get indexed if I only put them in my sitemap and don't link to them through my actual site (though the pages will be live). Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
Travis0 -
Indexing/Sitemap - I must be wrong
Hi All, I would guess that a great number of us new to SEO (or not) share some simple beliefs in relation to Google indexing and Sitemaps, and as such get confused by what Web master tools shows us. It would be great if somone with experience/knowledge could clear this up for once and all 🙂 Common beliefs: Google will crawl your site from the top down, following each link and recursively repeating the process until it bottoms out/becomes cyclic. A Sitemap can be provided that outlines the definitive structure of the site, and is especially useful for links that may not be easily discovered via crawling. In Google’s webmaster tools in the sitemap section the number of pages indexed shows the number of pages in your sitemap that Google considers to be worthwhile indexing. If you place a rel="canonical" tag on every page pointing to the definitive version you will avoid duplicate content and aid Google in its indexing endeavour. These preconceptions seem fair, but must be flawed. Our site has 1,417 pages as listed in our Sitemap. Google’s tools tell us there are no issues with this sitemap but a mere 44 are indexed! We submit 2,716 images (because we create all our own images for products) and a disappointing zero are indexed. Under Health->Index status in WM tools, we apparently have 4,169 pages indexed. I tend to assume these are old pages that now yield a 404 if they are visited. It could be that Google’s Indexed quotient of 44 could mean “Pages indexed by virtue of your sitemap, i.e. we didn’t find them by crawling – so thanks for that”, but despite trawling through Google’s help, I don’t really get that feeling. This is basic stuff, but I suspect a great number of us struggle to understand the disparity between our expectations and what WM Tools yields, and we go on to either ignore an important problem, or waste time on non-issues. Can anyone shine a light on this for once and all? If you are interested, our map looks like this : http://www.1010direct.com/Sitemap.xml Many thanks Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fretts0 -
When I try creating a sitemap, it doesnt crawl my entire site.
We just launched a new Ruby app at (used to be a wordpress blog) - http://www.thesquarefoot.com We have not had time to create an auto-generated sitemap, so I went to a few different websites with free sitemap generation tools. Most of them index up to 100 or 500 URLS. Our site has over 1,000 individual listings and 3 landing pages, so when I put our URL into a sitemap creator, it should be finding all of these pages. However, that is not happening, only 4 pages seem to be seen by the crawlers. TheSquareFoothttp://www.thesquarefoot.com/http://www.thesquarefoot.com/users/sign_inhttp://www.thesquarefoot.com/searchhttp://www.thesquarefoot.com/renters/sign_upThis worries me that when Google comes to crawl our site, these are the only pages it will see as well. Our robots.txt is blank, so there should be nothing stopping the crawlers from going through the entire site. Here is an example of one of the 1,000s of pages not being crawled****http://www.thesquarefoot.com/listings/Houston/TX/77098/Central_Houston/3910_Kirby_Dr/Suite_204Any help would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheSquareFoot0