How can I make embedded YouTube videos point to my domain in the search results?
-
We've recently moved to using YouTube for embedded videos on our site. We have a number of videos that are embedded and then a larger number of videos which are part of our YouTube channel.
I've been reading recently that it's possible to get Google to list embedded video links pointing to your site rather than to YouTube itself. I am interesting in driving traffic directly from the search results to our pages rather than via YouTube. Could somebody provide a basic step by step guide on how to do this please? Or is this something that is not possible? I've been doing a lot of research online but, sadly, can't work out how to do this.
-
Yeah - that's a terrible and misleading article from Mark Robertson. In his defense, he has admitted some of the flaws in the comment thread, but he never clarified in the article that "indexed" does not equate to "ranking with a rich snippet in the Google organic results".
TL:DR - No, you can't do it and even if it does start working, it's a bad strategy as it's never going to be consistent when other's can also embed your YouTube videos and rank for them.
-
Thank you both - it sounds like we could have made a mistake here. I thought that there might be something fishy going on when I couldn't find any more information on how to do this!
Phil - the link is http://www.reelseo.com/embedded-youtube-indexed-google/.
-
Hey John,
Not sure where you've read this (please send me a link if you have one!) but basically, no, you can't do this.
When you consider the logistics of the situation, it becomes obvious why. There is no barrier to entry to embedding YouTube videos - meaning any site can embed any YouTube video, with Google having no concrete method (yet) to determine which video belongs to which site.
While YouTube videos can get indexed on pages on your site - allowing your pages to rank in the video search results for relevant terms - 9 times out of 10, the youtube.com version of the video will be the version that ranks in universal search results.
If you want your site to rank for your videos, you should be securely hosting rather than putting your videos on social platforms like YouTube. YouTube is great for videos with a viral or informational element that isn't tied to your brand, but for content that's only relevant when viewed on pages on your domain, the content really won't do you any good on YouTube.
Here is a bit more information...http://moz.com/blog/the-marketing-value-of-youtube, http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy
-
I've never heard of this, i'd be surprised to hear it is true. You can use a standalone player like Flowplayer and host this videos yourself pretty easily.
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
-
Site videos and rich snippets - where to place video
Hi all, we have product videos that we are putting on our (new) site. The video thumbnail for a product is displayed along with image thumbnails on the product details page i.e. see here: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/twin-dvd-player/nextbase-sdv48ac/ Click on the video thumbnail and a lightbox pop up window displays the movie. We would like to markup the videos with rich snippet markup. Is this possible with the videos setup in this way (i.e. video displayed in Lightbox) or would we need to embed the video in the product description text on this page (rather than thumbnail with Lightbox popup as it is at the moment) so that we stood a chance of getting a rich snippet on Google SERPs for our product detail pages? Thanks for any help.
Image & Video Optimization | | jasef0 -
Video SiteMap Updating
Hi all! We noticed some issues with our sitemap and so we went through and optimized it to re-submit it. At the same time, it seemed prudent to optimize our video sitemap, however we probably should have thought through that more as we are seeing the numbers of indexed videos going down. Why and what we changed: We recently moved from flash/flv video to Html5 videos with webm and mp4. So it seemed prudent to change our sitemap which was using the old flv videos. At the same time updating our videos with more SEO friendly titles seemed prudent. So far our indexed videos from the video sitemap have gone from 70,000 to 28,000, so: A. How much does a video sitemap depend on the URL of the web page versus the title and the video itself? I am assuming that Google sees a new file extension and title and assumes that it is a completely new video and that might be why they are de-indexing the old ones? I suppose we could go back and put the old sitemap to the old flv videos back up, but maybe we should just tough out the change and wait for the new videos to be indexed. Thanks!! Craig
Image & Video Optimization | | TheCraig0 -
Google Image Search?
We get very little search traffic from the images on our site & I can't necessarily figure out why? We post a ton & tag them correctly, we've got to be missing something? We are a Wordpress blog, can anyone provide some quality articles on Image search or have suggestions that should help to get more traffic? Our site does fairly well, as we get over 100k/visits a month, so we'd really like to get more traffic from our images.
Image & Video Optimization | | seointern0 -
Finding Pages with Youtube Embedded Videos in Google SERP
I'm trying to figure out a process to find specific youtube embed videos using Google search. But a lot of sites are not being returned. For example, I know that the following video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MnylRaQC3w) is linked to and embedded on http://gizmodo.com/5898438/watch-how-fender-builds-its-iconic-stratocasters However, I can't figure out a set of search terms to find that in Google. Searching for (1MnylRaQC3w Gizmodo) doesn't return the right page in the results. I'd like to figure this out so I could see everywhere a certain youtube video has been embedded.
Image & Video Optimization | | nixforsix0 -
Best practice using Video to increase website pagerank?
Goal: Leverage videos to get links and traffic back to website not video hosting platform site (e.g. YouTube) to generate website leads **Issue: ** If we place a video on a website using video YouTube embed code and video sitemap for the crawlers to index our video DOES show up in search results BUT that link goes back to YouTube. Great for increasing views on YouTube but not increasing link popularity for client website. Question: What are recommendations / best practice for SEO (such as using another player like Viddler, etc.) that will get video results from search engines back to the website? We want to leverage videos to build links and generate leads to client site.
Image & Video Optimization | | jfeitlinger0 -
Video Rankings and Optimization Issues
I have noticed for some pages of the site I am working on that I see the video that is posted on that page ranking a lot higher than the page itself or the page does not rank at all, just the video. I'm curious to know if these two can technically be competing for rankings and if Google sees that the page does not need to rank because it chooses to put the related video into the SERPs. Also, has anyone seen any differences in the way videos rank based on where it's hosted (youtube, wistia, etc)? I would think this is common sense not to but still unsure, is it bad practice to keep videos hosted on multiple sites (currently I am adding videos on a new host, but have not deleted the old ones on Youtube yet)?
Image & Video Optimization | | Hakkasan0 -
Page speed not good despite CDN and caching. Can this be fixed?
My page speed results are here, showing a speed of 40 seconds. I get an F for compress text, compress images and cache static content.How do I resolve this? Also.. I've set up a CDN. Is it a problem for SEO, that there is a copy of all my images and content at cdn.mysite.com? We get lots of search traffic through google images search.
Image & Video Optimization | | devdg0 -
How do you bounce back from a loss in image search?
Looking for any help in understanding what I can do to get my images back up in the images index. My site took a hit last month which I've been working to get back up but nothing has seemed to push the needle. Has anyone else experienced such a loss in the image index before? kVTuL.png
Image & Video Optimization | | DotCar0
