Embed hosted videos or Youtube videos on site
-
Youtube is our major source of traffic.
We also have many of the same videos on our own site, self-hosted. They use the same video player as our paid video course, which allows the user to increase or decrease speed.
We're debating whether to replace these self-hosted videos with youtube embeds.
Pros:
- Increase Youtube viewcounts
- More engagement with videos (videos suggested at end of youtube videos are almost all our own)
Cons
- Possible outbound traffic to youtube.
- We can't showcase our video player's speed change function
I'm not sure how embed views are taken into account by Youtube, and how big a factor outbound traffic is. Would you suggest swapping out our self-hosted videos for embeds?
We want to maintain our Youtube channel's edge, and convince people to sign up for our course.
-
If you just want the videos watched - Host the YouTube versions, but bear in mind that you'll be sacrificing rankings to your own site as a consequence.
Additionally consider that View Counts don't actually effective YouTube video's ranking position much. More important to improve visibility on YouTube.com is the user engagement (how many peopel watch the video through to the end and then thumb/comment/share it).
-
With all respect, that article is completely misleading.
While YouTube videos will almost always get indexed on your site, it does not then follow that your site is the one that ranks for them. 99 times out of 100, YouTube will outrank your site with the rich snippet.
-
We have the videos on Youtube right now as part of our marketing strategy. Currently, Youtube traffic is a large percentage of our referrals. We wouldn't take those videos down, even if we keep the self hosted embeds.
Does that change your answer? Our PageRank is pretty low, so I'm not sure we could outrank our competitors' Youtube videos even if we took down our own and set up a proper video sitemap.
Thanks
-
If you properly code a video you host yourself on your website, you have a chance for your page to rank for that video with a thumbnail in the search results as well, giving it a better CTR than a standard link.
If you host the video on youtube, then youtube will always out rank your site, so you're sending more traffic to youtube instead of to your sites page which will convert hopefully.
Webmasters spend time and money setting up a player on their site just for this reason. If you haven't generated video image thumbnails and submitted video sitemap.xml files you haven't done what you need to do in order to see the effectiveness that hosting videos on your own platform could bring.
-
I don't see why not, if the SERP display is the same, then it should have the same chance of increasing your click through.
I would say that would be a great test. Try a few videos using embedded youtube - so you can get more views (as you stated is desired) and a few self hosted. See if you can get them both to get an enhanced SERP display and watch the traffic.
-
That's a good point. We don't currently have a video sitemap, but we could set one up.
I did see this article that suggests Youtube embeds can now achieve the same effect. Do you know if they can be made just as effective?
-
One of the things you'll hear Rand stressing lately is how enhanced your SERP result is for your site. I believe that by self hosting and properly optimizing (video sitemap and related content) you could see higher click through for pages which get a video snippet in the SERP. You take up more real estate in the results and draw the users eye in. This could get you higher CTR and in the end more video views.
-
Hmm...the main action we want people to take on the page is to watch the video. The main effect of embedding them would be to boost our view counts. But I've heard embeds don't translate 1-to-1 into increased views, and I know a lot of companies (such as SEOmoz) self-host rather than embed.
I presume there is a reason.
What kind of CTA did you have in mind? I'm not sure what question it would solve.
-
How about adding a cta (call to action) next to your embedded video and then doing A/B split testing in Google Analytics Experiments?
Serve 2-3 versions of the same URL to your visitors, track everything in GA Experiments and then you'll get an idea which solution is better for your site.
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
-
Ajax tabs on site
Hello, On a webpage I have multiple tabs, each with their own specific content. Now these AJAX/JS tabs, if Google only finds the first tab when the page loads the content would be too thin. What do you suggest as an implementation? With Google being able to crawl and render more JS nowadays, but they deprecated AJAX crawling a while back. I was maybe thinking of doing a following implementation where when JS is disabled, the tabs collapse under each other with the content showing. With JS enabled then they render as tabs. This is usually quite a common implementation for tabbed content plugins on Wordpress as well. Also, Google had commented about that hidden/expandable content would count much less, even with the above JS fix. Look forward to your thoughts on this. Thanks, Conrad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conalt1 -
My client wants to apply schematic markup to their iframe youtube video. Is this possible?
I have a client that wants to apply video object schema to their iframe youtube video. Here is the source code: <iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/clientvideo" width="272" height="202" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe> Is it possible to apply schema markup to this kind of iframe source code? Our development team was having a hard time with it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
SEO question regarding rails app on www.site.com hosted on Heroku and www.site.com/blog at another host
Hi, I have a rails app hosted on Heroku (www.site.com) and would much prefer to set up a Wordpress blog using a different host pointing to www.site.com/blog, as opposed to using a gem within the actual app. Whats are peoples thoughts regarding there being any ranking implications for implementing the set up as noted in this post on Stackoverflow: "What I would do is serve your Wordpress blog along side your Rails app (so you've got a PHP and a Rails server running), and just have your /blog route point to a controller that redirects to your Wordpress app. Add something like this to your routes.rb: _`get '/blog', to:'blog#redirect'`_ and then have a redirect method in your BlogController that simply does this: _`classBlogController<applicationcontrollerdef redirect="" redirect_to="" "url_of_wordpress_blog"endend<="" code=""></applicationcontrollerdef>`_ _Now you can point at yourdomain.com/blog and it will take you to the Wordpress site._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anward0 -
Bad site migration - what to do!
Hi Mozzers - I'm just looking at a site which has been damaged by a very poor site migration. Basically, the old URLs were 301'd to a page on the new website (not a 404) telling everyone the page no longer existed. They did not 301 old pages to equivalent new pages. So I just checked Google WMT and saw 1,000 crawl errors - basically the old URLs. This migration was done back in February, since when traffic to the website has never recovered. Should I fix this now? Is it worth implementing the correct 301s now, after such a timelapse?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
New Site Structure and 301s
We're moving towards a new site with new site structure. The old site has numerous backlinks to past events that won't be published on the new site. The new site will have about 60 future events that are currently active on the old site as well. I was wondering the best way to move forward with the 301 redirect plan. I was considering redirecting the old site structure to an "archive.ourdomain.co.uk" subdomain and redirecting the 60 or so active events to their equivalents on the new site. Would this be a sensible plan? Also for the active events, is there any difference between: _redirecting the old page to the archive page and then forwarding to the equivalent on the new page _ and redirecting the old page directly to the new page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chanm790 -
Problems with a NoIndex NoFollow Site
For legal reasons my website is going to launch non-branded websites. We do not have the capacity to make these site sufficiently unique from the main site so we are planning on having them be NoIndex NoFollow. Are there any potential SEO problems here? What will the implication be if in ~1-2 years from launching the NoIndex NoFollow we make the site unique, take away the tag and want to start promoting these sites organically. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Site comparison - what is wrong with me?
www.bcspeakers.com/ vs www.psbspeakers.com/ with the search term "speakers" why does BC speakers show up in around #50-60 and PSB is not in the top #1000? From all metrics on seomoz PSB kicks BC in every area by a large margine! can anyone see why BC is listed for that keyword and PSB is not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevin48030 -
One site or five sites for geo targeted industry
OK I'm looking to try and generate traffic for people looking for accommodation. I'm a big believer in the quality of the domain being used for SEO both in terms of the direct benefit of it having KW in it but also the effect on CTR a good domain can have. So I'm considering these options: Build a single site using the best, broad KW-rich domain I can get within my budget. This might be something like CheapestHotelsOnline.com Advantages: Just one site to manage/design One site to SEO/market Better potential to resell the site for a few million bucks Build 5 sites, each catering to a different region using 5 matching domains within my budget. These might be domains like CheapHotelsEurope.com, CheapHotelsAsia.com etc Advantages: Can use domains that are many times 'better' by adding a geo-qualifier. This should help with CTR and search Can be more targeted with SEO & Marketing So hopefully you see the point. Is it worth the dilution of SEO & marketing activities to get the better domain names? I'm chasing the longtail searchs whetever I do. So I'll be creating 5K+ pages each targeting a specific area. These would be pages like CheapestHotelsOnline.com/Europe/France/Paris or CheapHoteslEurope.com/France/Paris to target search terms targeting hotels in Paris So with that thought, is SEO even 100% diluted? Say, a link to the homepage of the first option would end up passing 1/5000th of value through to the Paris page. However a link to the second option would pass 1/1000th of the link juice through to the Paris page. So by thet logic, one only needs to do 1/5th of the work for each of the 5 sites ... that implies total SEO work would be the same? Thanks as always for any help! David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OzDave0