Video Hosting Service or YouTube?
-
We are considering using a video hosting service like Vzaar or Wistia for our videos.
What are some of the SEO advantages of using a video hosting service rather than YouTube?
-
Phil from Distilled weighed in on this question today in a different thread at www.seomoz.org/q/best-way-to-host-video; his answer might help you as well.
-
Have you chosen a service yet? I don't have experience in this area, but SEOmoz does use Wistia and I've heard great things from the other staff members at Moz about Wistia. In an SEOmoz post about favorite tools, Jamie writes:
Wistia is video hosting on steroids. Not only does this video hosting platform support HTML5, which makes your videos viewable on a slew of non-Flash enabled devices, but the platform is inherently designed for SEO. Try searching Google for "Top 10 Web Apps We Love" and you'll likely see the above Wistia-hosted video that's included with this blog post. Their tracking and analytics are also the best we've seen in video hosting. See a sample report here.
-
Why not host on both platforms?
I agree that internal hosting can be more custom not direct traffic away from your site once the clip is over.
Is their a way for the you tube videos to point towards your site?
-
If I were wanted to get a video to appear in the SERP's then my predisposition would be to use Youtube against the other services and to optimise the data filed that you have control of.
I agree with what people have said about the perception of videos on Youtube vs services such as Vimeo, Wistia etc...
-
Yes, good point. I forgot to mention that perception of your material might be different if users see that it's hosted on YouTube. Not saying better or worse - just different. Typically social and entertaining material seems to characterise Youtube more refined and artistic on Vimeo and specific on others (e.g. Howto videos).
-
assuming you have the bandwidth i would say host your own and have full controll, both technicaly and for the reasons Dejan presented. i also think that using youtube looks a bit tacky.
-
I agree with all of this, however I have yet to deal with a site that would benefit more from self-hosting than having a presence on YouTube, Vimeo, etc. In fact I've convinced clients to move their videos off their own sites, with good results. This may not be right for everyone, but for the majority it seems to be.
As far as direct SEO benefit goes, if your videos are optimized well they can show up directly on the SERPs. They're more likely to get the traffic and links they need for this on YouTube, etc.
-
Hosting your own videos means less leak to outside channels and your own branding. Every hosted video platform has a way of getting users away from your site (ad, logo to youtube, related videos...etc). If you introduce your videos on Vimeo, Youtube and such they can provide a valuable stream of traffic and extra exposure much like eBay does for product sellers who also have an eCommerce store of their own. If the video goes truly viral however, the bills for hosted solutions could be hefty with some paid video hosting providers.
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
-
Moving from Blogspot to blog hosted on our domain
Hi there, I work for a furniture retailer in the UK and I have a question about moving our blog. We have had a blog at www.ourcompany.blogspot.co.uk since 2012 and it was last updated mid 2014. There are about 100 posts and the content is actually really good, not spammy in any way and not stuffed with links to our site. The content is essentially guides to buying the right furniture. We have now launched blog functionaility on our website at www.ourcompany.co.uk/blog as I feel this is a better long-term solution to increasing site traffic and page rank. I want to pick your brains on the best way to handle the old content. A: Copy all the Blogspot content across and back date it to the same date it was originally published and then delete the old Blogspot account? Or will Google see this as duplicate content. B: Backup all the Blogspot content now, delete the Blogspot account and then repost this content at a later date? Will this still be seen as duplicate content? 😄 something else. Thanks for reading.
Content Development | | Bee1590 -
B2b services site, deep long tail services or flat and broad
Hi all, i have a small internet agency with services in several area's.
Content Development | | mdkay
Currently i structud my services in 2 different area's.
General services and specialized products with services underneath. like so:
domain.com/services
domain.com/services/service1
domain.com/services/service2
and so on. domain.com/product
domain.com/product/service1
domain.com/product/service2 domain.com/product2
domain.com/product2/service1
domain.com/product2/service2 But now im thinking of create loads of different services i provide,
there are some overlapping content of course, but all services are still individual.
But i can write a lot of unique content about all the services. But is it smarter to make just a few big pages with the services more bundled.
Or really long tail. Now i have around 15 services pages.
when i make it a lot deeper im talking about 40 pages. Currently my complete website is around 35 pages.0 -
Duplicate content between my web and Youtube
I have a web with 90 vídeos hosted in my Youtube channel and each video have an description in single url, but Youtube videos have no description. If I copy description from my web and paste to Youtube description, this is duplicate content for Google ?
Content Development | | VisualService1 -
Video content sites
In addition to you tube are there any other video sites worth uploading content to? Such as Vimeo? Are these any good or is you tube the only place worth publishing
Content Development | | Hardley1110 -
Blogger Outreach - have you used this service before?
Hi, Has anyone used blogdash.com before? It says it has over 100,000 blog owners registered, which does sound good but when you look at the sites own social following its very poor and when you start to dig a little deeper you can find blog owner profiles like this: http://www.blogdash.com/blogger/ari-herzog First view, you think Ari Herzog has signed up to Blog Dash and you can pitch him content for blogs such as Huffington Post and Mashable, took about 10 seconds to realise he isn't actually part of the network as the yellow box is asking him to signup if he ever finds that page. Has anyone used this service? I can imagine 2% out of the 100,000 are actually members who have signed up.
Content Development | | activitysuper0 -
Which is the best site to host photos on?
For SEO and in general, which is the best website to host photos on and why: Flickr.com or Picasa.com or Whosay.com?
Content Development | | tennisexpress0 -
Online proofreading service
We are mostly writing our own article but need a helping hand proof reading and putting the final touch on the articles. Any ideas to online services offering this?
Content Development | | Resultify0 -
Posting youtube videos on your site-use irframe or "old embed code"
If you choose "embed" now, youtube gives you the choice of using an iframe: <iframe width="430" height="352" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/0-nKXALtHWs?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe> or, the old embed code: <object width="430" height="352"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/0-nKXALtHWs?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/0-nKXALtHWs?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="430" height="352" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></object> Is either better when it comes to seo?
Content Development | | MarieHaynes0