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 -
Is this a good sitemap hierarchy for a big eCommerce site (50k+ pages).
Hi guys, hope you're all good. I am currently in the process of designing a new sitemap hierarchy to ensure that every page on the site gets indexed and is accessible via Google. It's important that our sitemap file is well structured, divided and organised into relevant sub-categories to improve indexing. I just wanted to make sure that it's all good before forwarding onto the development team for them to consider. At the moment the site has everything thrown into /sitemap.xml/ and it exceeds the 50k limit. Here is what I have came up with: A primary sitemap.xml referencing other sitemap files, each of the following areas will have their own sitemap of which is referenced by /sitemap.xml/. As an example, sitemap.xml will contain 6 links, all of which link to other sitemaps. Product pages; Blog posts; Categories and sub categories; Forum posts, pages etc; TV specific pages (we have a TV show); Other pages. Is this format correct? Once it has been implemented I can then go ahead and submit all 6 separate sitemaps to webmaster tools + add a sitemap link to the footer of the site. All comments are greatly appreciated - if you know of a site which has a good sitemap architecture, please send the link my way! Brett
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Adding videos to a website
Hello! We are producing multiple videos (each about 1-minute long) for a company website. We have decided to use Wistia to host them, in order get the full SEO benefits of links to the videos. I have two questions: 1. Would it definitely be better for SEO to divide up the videos and place them on the various existing pages of the site that are related to the video content, rather than putting all the videos together on a separate video page? 2. If we do put different videos on different pages, would it be a bad idea also to have a video page with all the videos together? Would this be considered duplicate content? Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyc-seo0 -
XML Sitemap Questions For Big Site
Hey Guys, I have a few question about XML Sitemaps. For a social site that is going to have presonal accounts created, what is the best way to get them indexed? When it comes to profiles I found out that twitter (https://twitter.com/i/directory/profiles) and facebook (https://www.facebook.com/find-friends?ref=pf) have directory pages, but Google plus has xml index pages (http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml). If we go the XML route, how would we automatically add new profiles to the sitemap? Or is the only option to keep updating your xml profiles using a third party software (sitemapwriter)? If a user chooses to not have their profile indexed (by default it will be index-able), how do we go about deindexing that profile? Is their an automatic way of doing this? Lastly, has anyone dappled with google sitemap generator (https://code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator/) if so do you recommend it? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | keywordwizzard0 -
Total Indexed 1.5M vs 83k submitted by sitemap. What?
We recently took a good look at one of our content site's sitemap and tried to cut out a lot of crap that had gotten in there such as .php, .xml, .htm versions of each page. We also cut out images to put in a separate image sitemap. The sitemap generated 83,000+ URLs for google to crawl (this partially used the Yoast Wordpress plugin to generate) In webmaster tools in the index status section is showing that this site has a total index of 1.5 million. With our sitemap coming back with 83k and google indexing 1.5 million pages, is this a sign of a CMS gone rogue? Is it an indication that we could be pumping out error pages or empty templates, or junk pages that we're cramming into Google's bot? I would love to hear what you guys think. Is this normal? Is this something to be concerned about? Should our total index more closely match our sitemap page count?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoninjaz0 -
CSS gallery, directories, infographic anjd video sites?
If we have some good content (info graphic and video) is there anything wrong with submitting to as many video and info graphic directories and video hosts as possible or are 99% of them as bad as submitting to directories and would we be looking at a penalty? Also another side question, are CSS gallery's and niche pacific directories such as running a printing company and finding directories on (graphic design, craft and art) a bad idea to submit to.in any quantity are they as bad as the free for all directories that Google doesn't like. We compete in a not very hard niche and need to build a few low authority links (build out our link graph) but not low enough to be classed as low quality (Google penalty's in the future). Most of our competitors are happy to submit to anything but we wan the site to last.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Does Google index more than three levels down if the XML sitemap is submitted via Google webmaster Tools?
We are building a very big ecommerce site. The site has 1000 products and has many categories/levels. The site is still in construccion so you cannot see it online. My objective is to get Google to rank the products (level 5) Here is an example level 1 - Homepage - http://vulcano.moldear.com.ar/ Level 2 - http://vulcano.moldear.com.ar/piscinas/ Level 3 - http://vulcano.moldear.com.ar/piscinas/electrobombas-para-piscinas/ Level 4 - http://vulcano.moldear.com.ar/piscinas/electrobombas-para-piscinas/autocebantes.html/ Level 5 - Product is on this level - http://vulcano.moldear.com.ar/piscinas/electrobombas-para-piscinas/autocebantes/autocebante-recomendada-para-filtros-vc-10.html Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Keeping the Navigation on the Sitemap HTML Page?
Hey everyone. We are about to create a sitemap.html page and have always just kept the site theme in place and put the sitemap in the "content" section of the page, with the header navigation, sidebars and footer in place. Well, now with the new "only first link counts" Google rule, wouldn't it be better to just have a "plain" html sitemap page without any other links on it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesO0