Should I delete youtube videos when moving to Wistia (or other on-site platform)?
-
One of my new clients recently built a site that has a great potential for ranking product pages with video rich snippets. Each product page has a single video, but they are currently hosted on youtube and embedded using Youtube iframes.
Overall the videos aren't a great fit for Youtube, and we have decided to move the product videos to Wistia. (Much thanks to Phil Nottingham for his answers in this post, and his overall insights on video SEO in general). So what is the best way to make sure we get original credit for the video? I'm planning to take down all the product videos from the Youtube account as soon as we switch the embeds on the site. Is that enough?
-
Second Phil on this one: "You can find that YouTube will outrank your pages, which splits your traffic and view count, thereby damaging your SEO" This is the major issue here.
-
I do agree that video helps with conversion, but I also agree that Youtube isn't the right place for these conversion type videos. Even with a high conversion rate, they aren't being watched enough for it to have an effect in this case. (Each video has <50 views over 3 months)
-
Thanks so much Phil,
I didn't even realize there was an option for "unlisted". Because these are the ever-difficult-to-get-links-to product pages, I am hoping to try to get a few sites that have already embedded the videos to switch to the custom player.
-
Actually, this isn't quite true Moosa...
Very few people convert from watching YouTube videos and the CTR back to a site in order to make purchases is typically less than 1%.
-
Not true. Just because a video is on YouTube, it doesn't mean it'll rank better than if it is self hosted.
-
No, don't do this, it's a bad idea.
Just because you have content assets doesn't mean you should put them everywhere (it's the same principle as syndicating a blog post). If the content isn't relevant for an audience on YouTube, which product/sales focused videos typically aren't, then they shouldn't be on there. Content should be created for the YouTube channel, not just put on there because you have it.
Additionally, self hosting your content and putting it on YouTube can have negative technical impacts. You can find that YouTube will outrank your pages, which splits your traffic and view count, thereby damaging your SEO; you're also failing to optimise for YouTube in this way, since you won't be driving any YouTube views through the video embeds.
For product videos, the goal is never to get as many people to see them as possible, but rather to drive as many sales as possible, which means you need to get people to view the content in a context where they can make a purchase (not on YouTube, since there's no "buy" button).
-
Hey Sirmontegu,
Basically, I'd recommend you just mark the YouTube videos as unlisted (which is like putting a noindex tag on your videos) so that user experience isn't damaged for anyone who has already linked to the videos and you'll retain the view count on your channel (good for social proof) but will also ensure your YouTube videos don't outrank the canonical version on your site, as well as ensuring your more YouTube friendly content is prominent on your channel.
Then all you need to do is ensure you're submitted a video sitemap (with the Wistia toolset) and you should get the videos indexed on your site.
Cheers,
Phil.
-
I guess Eric is right just let them be on youtube and also make sure they are ranking high when someone search for it on youtube.
The percentage of people who convert after watching a video online (big number watch videos on youtube) so this is good for your conversions as well.
Hope this helps!
-
I would keep them on YouTube. Since YouTube is owned by Google, they rank their videos higher on Google higher searches so you don't want to lose that. I agree with Eric. If anything, keep them in both places.
-
I would keep the videos on YouTube. In fact, it's usually recommended that you post them on multiple video sites for additional distribution. Even though you're not necessarily going to link to the YouTube videos from your site, you'll often get people who will view them there. And you can't ignore YouTube since it does have the most traffic.
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
-
YouTube SEO: Can low quality videos you posted in the past hurt your seo for future videos ?
I have a very old youtube channel (10 years maybe) with some low quality videos and a few thousands subscribers. Now I decided to give it go and make good quality videos. But one question keeps coming: maybe the fact that this channel is old and with bad videos with very low retention, this would affect the seo of the new videos ? Is it better to start a new channel from scratch ? even if its more difficult ? Thank you!
Image & Video Optimization | | glinski.netflix0 -
YouTube Videos on SERPS
Hi there, One of my clients is asking why there's this big SEO result when https://www.google.es/search?q=botemania+youtube&oq=botemani&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j0j69i61j69i57j0l2.1149j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8. What kind of search results are thos with this big video first result? Any tips how to achieve this? Something related with the views, video description?. I tested a few other similar queries, even big brands included in the search query and this kind of SEO result does not show up. Any help would be appreciated, thanks! qGwcE
Image & Video Optimization | | poliedric0 -
Is it possible for a web site to get 'Pigeon Holed' geographically?
I have a site that sells widgets. It's called widgets.com. I want to sell widgets locally in 10 different geographic areas so my url structure/kw goal is as follows: URL KW I Hope to Rank For
Image & Video Optimization | | BrianJGomez
widgets.com 'Widgets'
widgets.com/houston/ 'Houston Widgets'
widgets.com/dallas/ 'Dallas Widgets' So I've optimized my site accordingly where my home page has no Geo optimization and my 'city pages' are all geo optimized, complete with hcard brick and mortar addresses that are all legit offices that sell our widgets. My problem, is that despite all that, my home page (which again, is not geo-optimized) is now ranking for 'Dallas Widgets'. This is messing up my strategy and very frustrating because the home page does not have any information Dallas residents will find helpful about widgets. So my question is, am I better off just owning this 'Dallas' label is forcing on my site and just optimize the home page for dallas and keep the rest of the 9 cities in their directories? Does anyone have any experience with getting pigeonholed geographically speaking?0 -
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 -
Best way to use popular YouTube channel for SEO purposes
Hi all, We have a YouTube channel containing about 25 videos we created professionally a few years ago. They are all product features and are hosted on our site for applicable products (a very small percentage of our overall number of products). This channel was largely forgotten about for a few years. It has now reached over 160k views. What's the best way to utilize these videos for SEO benefits? Any techniques anyone has to maximize our ever increasing number of views? Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | bradkrussell0 -
How to get video content indexed (incl. example)?
Hi, I am currently working with my first client on SEO, and I've been asked (among other things) to help them get their video content indexed by Google. Since this is my first client, and I haven't worked much with videos, I hope I can get some tips. An example of one of their "theme pages" is about studying in Australia. The site is in Norwegian and don't mind the pop-up: http://www.studenttorget.no/australia I would love to get some feedback to what I should do about this page in order to help them get their videos indexed. By the way, they're considering hosting their own videos, and creating a system to keep everything local. Is this a better solution to seo than if the videos are hosting on YouTube/Vimeo or something else? Thanks. Jens P. Berget
Image & Video Optimization | | berget0 -
Self Hosting Videos in Wordpress
Hi, I'm trying to figure out the best way to host my own videos on my website in addition to uploading them to YouTube. My site is Wordpress-based, and I use Pages for the main landing pages, Posts to create the different products I offer. Is there a good way to upload my videos of each product into those Posts for SEO purposes? Maybe there's a specific plugin that I should be using? Thanks in advance, Shawn
Image & Video Optimization | | darkgreenguy0 -
Video SERP question
Hello MOZ Helpers.. Sometimes video results pop up in Uiversal search..for example for "recycle paint" my video for recycle paint residing on my website shows up on a Universal SERP SEE IMAGE 1..This happens even when I use an ip mask or change local..the confusing part is why my personal version trumps my youtube version SEE IMAGE 2. What metric(s) is Google using to rank videos, and what kind of benefit does this provide if the video points to your site vs. a video service like youtube or 5min? I have attached 2 images with IMGUR but search "recycle paint" to recreate [" target="_blank">>](<img src= "Hosted by imgur.com") [" target="_blank">>](img src= "Hosted by imgur.com") [http://imgur.com/tdCVM.jpg](a href= "Hosted by imgur.com")" target="_blank">a> [http://imgur.com/tdCVM.jpg](a href= "Hosted by imgur.com")" target="_blank">a> [" target="_blank">>](<img src= "Hosted by imgur.com") [" target="_blank">>](<img src= "Hosted by imgur.com") [" target="_blank">>](<img src= "Hosted by imgur.com")
Image & Video Optimization | | johnshearer0