Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Vimeo offer a great service, but be aware that the original focus of vimeo was a creative content, rather than a commercial service and so they don't allow you to upload anything blatantly commercial or marketing focussed unless you pay for the pro package, which is a relatively inexpensive $199 per year. If you have something nicely designed and artistic though (even if it is a bit commercial in nature), you may get away with it.

I wouldn't be so down on YouTube because of the ads. Its very easy to embed YouTube videos on your site, the content is mobile friendly and you can choose whether or not to allow adverts on any of your videos. Plus, YouTube gets indexed very quickly and you can optimise your content for search within the platform to achieve greater overall exposure. YouTube also has very smart variable bit-rate progressive encoding, so the service is excellent if you have very high-definition content but want people to be able to watch it without spending any time buffering on low bandwidth connections. The main downside to YouTube is it's security and that ads for other videos will come up in the embedded player on your site after your video has finished playing.

If you want to maintain a fully branded and corporate feel or secure you video from privacy, services like Wistia, Brightcove and Vzaar are all very good and simple to use, though will charge you for hosting based on bandwidth use. Wistia is particularly good because it submits sitemaps on your behalf which can aid you in getting blended results for your videos.

Alternatively, if you have the time and resources, then you could build your own HTML5 player and host the content on your own servers or through a cloud system like Amazon Web Services. There are some plugins and free apps which claim to assist with this, but i haven't tried any of them out.

The question which will ultimately define the answer to your initial query is "What am I trying to achieve with this video?" If you just want pure exposure, then i would host it on YouTube, embed the content on your site, submit a sitemap and optimise both the YouTube page and the page on your site for the same target keyword. If you want something to simply enrich your own website, but lock down the content to ensure any video views happen on your own site (which is what you want to do if your focus is link-building and referrals) then i would pay out the money for a service like Brightcove or Wistia.

So... yes, this is basically just a classic YouTube spam attack at reasonable scale. Nothing terribly sophisticated as far as I can ascertain (though I'm not going to out the tactics I see used publicly here).

It's  fairly common knowledge that the YouTube algorithm is much easier to spam than the Google algorithm (in some ways, it's like Google from 5 years ago) and sadly, this seems to cross over a bit into Google organic so that you can effectively get YouTube videos rankings for very competitive terms by virtue of the fact that Google often ranks YouTube pages/videos very highly, yet YouTube is seemingly not subject to quite the same spam detection or treatment as other websites.

I don't imagine this ranking will last (it'll get flagged eventually) and I'm not terribly impressed with the work done to achieve this, though obviously the results are pretty impressive if you're into grey hat/black hat stuff.

Basically - because in this instance, the video will clearly be very sales and conversion focused, advertising the resorts and service. Such content will do really badly on YouTube, which means it may get devalued by Google and therefore rank badly.

Therefore, you'll have nothing to gain from YouTube here and if you put the video on YouTube you risk YouTube outranking your own domain - for your homepage on a fairly small site like that, this could be disastrous. YouTube is a great place for more informational content that isn't tied to a specific sales funnel, but is a dreadful place to put anything more commercial that you really need your site to rank for.

I've written about these principles in depth here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo, here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy and here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-marketing-value-of-youtube

So, I think it's entirely feasible that Google have chosen to rank you lower in the page, but with a video rich snippet - but it may not be the case at all, you may have just lost rankings due to an algorithm update.

Video results are often given position 3 in the SERPs, but i've seen them appear elsewhere too. If there are a number of video results for a term which suggests a video result would be the best return i.e: "Tutorial", then these results can rank in the top positions.

However, the question i would be interested to hear the answer to is "Have you lost traffic?". Video rich snippets in position three often have a higher click through rate than the top result. If you've got lots of nice rich snippets (albeit with lower ranking), but are maintaining or growing your traffic - then clearly you're in a better position than you were before.

Google may also choose to not rank video results if it feels like videos are not appropriate for the search query. It's not always consistent with this, which is why you may have got some of your products getting the rich snippets, but not others.

What wont happen is that you receive a main listing and a second video snippet result for the same page. Video results are basically page results, but with extra metadata to indicate that there is a video on the page.

If this has caused you to lose traffic, then you could try putting the videos on a different page (with supporting text and content) for each product - and optimise those pages for longer tail keywords around your product, while letting the main product page rank for the head term. I wouldn't really recommend that though, as it will spread your link equity thinner and seems somewhat superfluous.

Hi Jennifer,

In short - the answer to both your questions is No. What you're doing is absolutely fine

With YouTube Closed captions - you can upload multiple files - covering multiple languages/descriptive transcripts/speech transcripts. All sorts if you really want to. There is no difference from an SEO perspective between the "captions" model with timecodes or simply the text "transcript". Both are ultimately read like copy text for the video.

The YouTube video embed on an external site is read as an independent media element with the uploaded transcript file as meta-data applied to that media. Even if the on-page copy contains the identical text, it appears as a different form to the engines and is valuable to users as well - there is no "duplicate content" risk, as the content is presented in totally different formats.

I would continue with what you're currently doing - which sounds good :).

Phil

Im afraid i haven't yet found one that is remotely good outside of Wistia (but that's paid).

I'd suggest using excel to put together the elements and then turn the output into plain text - shouldn't be too painstaking, but you will need some element of manual input - i.e. defining the URL, content location and thumbnail location at a minimum.

Hi Claire,

So, in essence - i don't think this is a great idea, primarily because i think it carries enormous risks that will be difficult to manage if you take this approach at scale.

Firstly, what happens if your free clients don't rank following the on-page work and linkbuilding you do?

Assumedly, as they're a free client, there is no contract involved here - so if the work you do doesn't help, then they will likely refuse you access to their site to build links out on while presenting you with a large reputation risk if they decide to negatively "out" your practice. Moreover, the lack of contract again means that you will have no legitimate complaint if they decide, a few months after your work with them, that they want to remove the links and articles you have placed on their site.

Are you being upfront with the free clients about the sites you will link out to on their site? If it's not in their niche, or worse something highly spammy - i can imagine a lot of them getting upset about you using their site to advertise on.

Additionally, this seems like a very expensive and time consuming way to build links for your existing paying clients. if you have to do more SEO and linkbuilding work every time you need to get a new link from a site - you'll be putting in dozens of man hours for only a handful of links on PR2 blogs that you are at risk of losing at the whim of an unhappy webmaster. If however, the plan is to have basically free access to a site after you've  done a little bit of SEO work - then you're basically just taking advantage of the free sites that sign up and again risk losing it all if a few of them become unhappy.

It seems to me that a better way to approach the concept would be to find these decent blogs/sites and then build a strong guest posting relationship with them, offering them quality content in exchange for links. This way, the content containing the links becomes the value you are exchanging, rather than the somewhat intangible SEO work and it's clear what both sides are getting out of the deal on an ongoing basis.

Alternatively, there's nothing wrong with brokering relationships between sites that you work with, allowing them to guest post for each other and strike up an ongoing relationship; I would just be wary of leaving yourself as the middleman, unprotected by any contract or basic trade agreement.

Hope that's helpful,

Phil

Hi Brett,

I'm afraid i haven't yet found a program that scales sitemap creation effectively or accurately. If you're hosting with Wistia, then they have a great app which does it automatically for you. Alternatively, it should be easy to put one together with Google's guide: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472

Or i have built a basic template here: http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/getting-video-results-in-google/

Hi July,

Yes - I think it's completely fine to do as you suggest, though I'd recommend seeing if you can leave the text on the page somewhere as well - just so the page isn't too thin on the text front. However, you don't need to put any of those keywords in bold, as Google don't really consider these factors much any more.

One thing I would suggest you think about though is not having the video set to auto-play - as many users find this sort of thing irritating. You should also make sure to host your video away from YouTube in this instance, so use a secure third party platform to serve the video.

Thanks.

Phil

Hi Stephen,

I'd advise you to think of this approach as akin to posting a blog post on your own site and then also posting it on someone else's site as a guest blog post with an adjusted Title and meta description.

It's not going to get you "penalised" for duplicate content as such, but It's hardly a great strategy in the majority of cases - as it will force you to cannibalise possible traffic and link equity across the locations.

First of all, I'd really question why your client wants to do this. If they think that somehow they have to have content on YouTube as it represents a potential traffic source - I'd definitely be keen to point out (in spite of what others have said in answer to your question) that click through rate from YouTube videos back to websites in links and annotations is extremely low. It's very hard to drive any significant amount of traffic from YouTube except through putting videos out at extreme scale (more details here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-marketing-value-of-youtube)

Secondly - I'd suggest asking yourself whether the content in question is really appropriate for a YouTube audience anyway? Do the videos hold their value outside of your clients domain? Is there any search volume on YouTube (use the YouTube keyword tool) for the keywords you're going to be targeting?

If you do want to go down the YouTube + securely hosted route for the same content, then I've detailed the exact technical approach required here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo (approach 4) but bear in mind that it's extremely rare to have content stylistically appropriate for both securely hosting on your site with a paid hosting solution (so you get traffic) and seeding on YouTube (so you can build brand awareness  through that community). If the videos in question are commercial or product focused, I can basically all but guarantee they won't be worth putting on YouTube and they'll potentially outrank your clients site while diluting the overall traffic to the site itself.

So... in short, it's not a problem if you have the right kind of content - but 9 times out of 10 it's not a particularly smart strategy.

I hope that's useful!

Cheers,

Phil.

You can implement schema was almost any kind of video embed, including an embedded YouTube video.

However, if your focus is on trying to get rich snippets in the search results, you'll be best of not using YouTube (more details here: http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy)

Hey Karen,

My answer would basically be - "You probably don't want to do both, but it really depends on the kind of content you have, what you're trying to achieve and whether there's demand for it on YouTube".

The important thing to remember about YouTube is that it's a social and community platform as much as a hosting service. It really isn't the appropriate place for every kind of video content so you need to take the perspective of "Would this video be relevant for anyone stumbling across it on YouTube without prior knowledge of my brand". You'll find that people don't go to YouTube with brand focused queries very often and nor do they often click back from a video to a third party site. This means the main value you're going to get for the platform will be brand awareness (see here for more details: http://moz.com/blog/the-marketing-value-of-youtube) but in order to achieve that you need to have content the YouTube audience care about. How to videos may well fit into that category, but only if they're solving generic problems and aren't specifically focused around your specific products.

The additional problem with putting videos on both Wistia (or self hosting) and YouTube is that YouTube can end up outranking your site for branded queries, which means you can potentially drive commercially focused traffic (those who may end up actually buying something!) to YouTube rather than your site and from here it's then very difficult to drive them back to your site (click through rates from YouTube are normally less than 1%); this means that, in essence, you can be unnecessarily adding and additional step in your product conversion funnel for some organic  searches.

So - in short, I probably wouldn't recommend it, but to start with you need to really work out what you're trying to achieve with your videos and determine who the audience is for this content specifically. I've written some more extensive articles about this issue in particular, so if you want more info I advise you to go have a read.

http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy

http://moz.com/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

http://www.distilled.net/training/video-marketing-guide/

I hope that's useful!

Phil

In short - It's probably worth proactively disavowing those links since it's a quick and easy task, but the possibility of them actually causing you any harm is ultimately very small.

I wouldn't worry about asking the webmasters to remove the links unless you're under manual penality, as this won't be a particularly good use of time.

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.

Hey,

So - the primary YouTube ranking factors are in essence the same as page ranking factors in Google. Each element sort of has equivalent meta data elements in YT.

Page Title = Video Title (And name of uploaded file!)

Meta Description = Video Description - be sure to put a link in here

Meta Tags = Meta Tags - these still work for YouTube, so be sure to include them

Page Copy = Closed Caption File.

There are also some unique ranking factors in YT which will make a big difference:

Hotspots metrics - The Youtube Hotspots graph shows user engagement in a video, you want to make these as "hot" as possible by ensuring everyone watches your video from beginning to end without bouncing or clicking out.

Likes and views - generally speaking, the more the better! Its also not problematic to get some thumbs down - this wont hurt your rankings, as some videos are popular but still get thumbs down (i.e. rickroll)

Basic advice for getting it optimised would be upload a closed caption file, ensure you're titles are optimised and that there's a few mentions of the keywords in the meta descriptions.

You should also be building links to the YT videos, through embeds and contextual references - if you can include some anchor text this will also help.

You should also submit a video XML sitemap.

For more advice on how to nail YT vide optimisation - Check out Dave Sottimanos post on the Distilled blog.

http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/youtube-seo/

Hey Erick,

The new YouTube profile structure is a pain in the ass - unfortunately it's now "nofollow" across the board, which comes as no surprise (as so many people were spamming it), but nonetheless prevents you from passing Pagerank off the back of a popular channel.

I'm afraid that I don't think there's an easy solution or alternative easy to game site that will provide the same value, so contrite as it is to say, I think we're back to the "build great content" manifesto in order to generate the same high quality followed links.

The list Charles gives away there is unfortunately redundant in the main, as it's from several years ago and most of those sites are now unrecognisably different. There are some video submission sites out there, but none of those are going to be a replacement for the YouTube profile link strategy, which was extremely easy to game and at huge scale.

However, there is a new thing you can do to get value out of  YouTube and that is getting "as seen on" attribution (which is a link to a blog where the video has been featured - visible in the bottom right of any video). Find videos with thousands/millions of views that currently don't have an "as seen on" attribution and embed them on a high authority blog with supporting text. You'll then get the "as seen on" attribution, which is a followed link through a 303 redirect - so probably doesn't pass any Pagerank - but is still a referring link, which can be valuable if you scale it up significantly.

Hope that's useful.

Cheers,

Phil

Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware - there is no way to fix this.

Google have started to move YouTube towards having a Google+ integration and this really hasn't been kept simple for those with a "corporate account" who don't want to tie the channel to a specific email or person.

one assumes they will eventually provide a way for you to fix this, but it may involve changing to a paid YouTube account of some sorts better aligned with a business than an individual.

So, sorry, no I don't think you can fix it - but I feel your pain!

Hi Julie,

I would sincerely advise against that approach for product videos. See my recent post on the topic. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

Self-hosting will have nothing to do with Google's choice of position for the ranking.

Only thing i have to add from Vahe's answer Peter is that you probably shouldn't use YouTube for this.

The Hotspot graph metrics for an "advert" style video like you're building will probably be very low, as will the overall views and this will cause Google to see it negatively and not rank it. If you use a service like Vzaar - http://www.vzaar.com or Wistia - http://www.wistia.com then you're probably more likely to get a good blended video result. With Wistia, you can also automatically add content to your sitemap, so i expect this will be a great way to go for you.

Cheers,

Phil

Creating great video on a budget isn't hard - you just need to have a killer idea behind it.

What worries me slightly here is that you seem to be focussed on the production elements (form) before having solidified the core idea (content) and what you want to achieve from the video.

If you take the approach that you're just going to do video and then work out afterwards what that video will look like, then decide what kinda content it'll be and how you'll integrate it in your site - you'll inevitably be doomed to failure with substandard content, as you'll have engaged in the process in exactly the wrong order.

The technical and practical approaches for your videos can only really be effectively decided once you have the core content idea planned out - using the audience goals and dramaturgy to determine the form.

So, my advice is to work as follows:

1. Work out what you want from the videos - why are you doing this? Conversions? Links? Branding?
2. Work out what the content is going to be - Tutorials? Product videos? This should be defined by the goals
3. How are you going to host the content - Platform? Location? Embed style?
4. How are you going to build out the content - Filming, Animation, Costs etc.

Once you've worked out the plan for points 1-3, you can look at point 4. below are a few tips for keeping costs down while achieving the desired outcomes. The biggest pointer I can give you is to say that if you're doing tutorial/informational content - then the quality can afford to be much less polished than anything with a sales focus. Remember the core of why people will watch the video - if it's to learn something or get an idea, provident the advice is good, the production doesn't need to do more than simply give away that information. I made these 57 videos in a day, with no budget, on that principle.

• Talking head/ direct interviews as part of tutorial/information content work well to improve brand trust.  If you don't have a strong identity, make sure you're getting the faces of the senior management at the firm in front of the camera. If you can combine this method with slide/shows animations for informational (not heavily promotional) content, then you can create great content very simply that works to express brand identity and convince potential customers of a USP. when doing some talking head stuff - make sure you have an interesting, ideally branded, physical background and film in well-lit conditions.
• If you want to buy a camera for short pieces, but have somewhat restricted budget, a good DSLR with a quality wide angle lens is usually your best bet, provident you don't require varied depth of field.
• If you want to outsource cheaply - i'd recommend looking on mandy.com to find some good freelance film professionals
• GoAnimate cartoons are fine - but really not appropriate if you have a serious brand or are trying to sell services/products. I'd only use these if you have a clear message/fun piece of content that has no informational/sales driven goals behind it
• If you do screencasts - make sure you add some motion or annotations to make it seem more polished and professional. Camtasia is a great, cheap program to do this with. Additionally - http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/ isn't bad.
• If you have skills in illustrator/photoshop, it's very simple to turn nice designs into beautiful animation using AfterEffects or Motion - with tons of good web tutorials out there for how to make that work. If you're a mac user, Motion is only $49 from the Mac app-store so great for restricted budgets.
• If it's a corporate feel to the site with business objectives - don't use sock puppets.
• If you're creating anything that is somewhat directly advertorial - make sure the production elements are strong
• Stock footage isn't that expensive - utilize some of that for anything advertorial that required quality production value. http://footage.shutterstock.com has a nice library.
• Actors are cheap. If you can offer some good exposure, it's not hard to pick up good actors for minimal costs or simply expenses for a short film.
• Find out which are the best schools/colleges/universities in your area with media/production departments. Speak to the students and see if you can get some to come in and work with you. Many students will value the opportunity and are happy to work for minimal fees.

Hope that's all useful.

Phil

Hi Richard,

Great set of questions. The main thing I want to highlight is that it's actually completely impossible for anyone to answer the questions you ask with any level of quality or detail without first spending some time looking into your content.

The decisions you make regarding YouTube vs self-hosted and how you promote the content absolutely have to be driven by the content itself and there's no strategy relevant without first looking into this. Would you be willing to share some of the content within this question so I can have a look at it?

All that said - there's a few principles here that are relevant to your situations. If you're trying to make something "go viral" in the social sense, YouTube is going to be more or less the only platform that will allow you to do this. However, if you're trying to drive traffic to your own product pages on your site - having the content self hosted and not putting it on YouTube at all is the right way to go. This is because YouTube can outrank you for your own content, but more importantly, the kind of content that will help to drive traffic and conversions on your site is almost never the kind of content that will also go viral. The two approaches are mutually exclusive.

If you're using JW player - the social buttons will point back to the page, which is cool, but make sure you're also including open graph tags and including all of the relevant meta data for that - e.g. video thumbnail  so that the videos share nicely across facebook.

Cheers,

Phil.

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.

Hey Rich,

So there's a few problems here which i think are preventing your videos from being indexed.

1. The main one is around your bespoke video player and the Javascript / Lightbox delivery - which, while potentially elegant from a users perspective, isn't great for Google. Currently the flash video player is only being delivered by a JS trigger and Google probably aren't picking it up.
2. You have more than one video on each page (and tons of duplicate videos) - All the "play product video" links at the bottom of the page are more lightboxes, which means you have 34 .mp4 files visible within the page source. Therefore, which video should google rank for the page?! It's not clear and with each video also replicated across many pages, it becomes a minefield for the Robots to navigate.
3. No Video XML sitemap

To get things fixed, i suggest you implement either a static flash player file within the base HTML (.swf or .flv) or do the whole thing with HTML5 video elements and try and find a way to "reveal" the video file without using lightboxes or JS. (i would plump for the latter).

You should also fix the "play video" links throughout the rest of the page to static HTML links - rather than lightboxes with more videos.

Lastly, of course, submit an XML video Sitemap. He's an example for the page you included - replicate this for the rest of your pages.

<loc>www.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/furniture/rustic-solid-oak-4-drawer-coffee-table/1149.html</loc>

video:thumbnail_lochttp://static.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/media/gbu0/prod350/rus18-4f0f1c68245c6.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>

video:titleRustic Solid Oak 4 Drawer</video:title>

video:descriptionThe Rustic Oak Four Drawer Coffee Table features a traditional farmhouse styling with ample storage space</video:description></video:description>

video:content_lochttp://video.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/rustic/Rustic-Solid-Oak-4-Drawer-Coffee-Table.mp4</video:content_loc>

video:duration56</video:duration>

video:publication_date2012-03-14T18:30:15+00:00</video:publication_date>

video:family_friendlyyes</video:family_friendly>

video:tagSolid Oak 4 Drawer</video:tag>

video:liveno</video:live>

If you change all that and it still doesn't work - let me know.

If it does work, you owe me a beer

All the best,

Phil

It ultimately depends on what you want to achieve - from both a business and marketing perspective.

If you want video rich snippets and conversions - use a third party solution like Wistia.

If you're trying to improve brand awareness through social engagement, use YouTube.

As it's essentially a show reel and you're trying to get people to come to the website in order to learn about the company - i would suggest using Wistia and focussing on rankings and conversions. The content won't do very well on YouTube, so you have little to gain by putting it there.

For a more in-depth explanation, i have written about the whole subject here www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo and this advice still stands.

I wrote a post about it

http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/using-wistias-customisable-embed-settings-to-build-links-with-your-video-content/

The answer would be - neither.

It's not quite correct to describe something as being preferable to Google in this instance (because ultimately Google want everyone to put all their videos on YouTube then embed them everywhere so they can make loads of money in ad revenue), but in terms of SEO for an eCommerce site, and assuming your videos are to some extend product focused pieces - you should avoid YouTube altogether, because it can cannibalise your rankings, while giving you very little benefit in terms of seeding on YouTube.com (people don't go to YouTube to find products to buy...)

I've written about this extensively here: http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy and here http://moz.com/blog/the-marketing-value-of-youtube

So, your best bet is using a third party paid hosting platform, e.g. Wistia, Vzaar etc... where you can retain full control of the videos and use them to drive traffic to your site and generate leads/sales.

In terms of implementation, It probably won't matter a great deal, as long as your videos are visible to Googlebot on pageload and not delivered dynamically with JavaScript etc..

All you need to do then to get the rich snippet is submit a video sitemap.

Hi ZoraS,

In short - yes, I think this site is pretty spammy and I wouldn't recommend putting in the effort to get links there. More than likely these links won't help your rankings much anyway, while at scale they could actively harm you.

Here's the post i've just published on the topic - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

Please have a read through, as it will add a bit more clarity to the benefits of each option. Your summary is great Kane.

Hey Dana,

Basically - I think you need to test this and test it again to find the solution :).

The DotSub content is essentially behaving in exactly the same way as the YouTube versions of your video - that is ranking well but driving traffic to a siloed page with just the video on and no way to drive further conversions. Given that the tutorial style of the content isn't very sales focused, I wouldn't be too concerned about that, but since you're splitting traffic between DotSub and YouTube - you're not doing all in your power to optimise your YouTube channel. Should you move just to Wistia and YouTube? - I think that really depends what you're trying to achieve with the videos. Currently I don't feel like they're amazing direct sales tools, so I wonder how much ranking your own domain for the terms in questions matters a great deal to the bottom financial line? The only way to really know that will be to test it rigorously.

You'll certainly be cannibalising direct traffic unless you choose just one channel, but really I think the question boils down far more to "what will be the best use of these videos?"

Cheers,

Phil.

1. As Geoff Andrews mentioned, if you use Wistia then they will autogenerate a sitemap for you, which can be quite helpful if you dont have the time to build it yourself - but it's not a big job to create one.

2. From a crawling and indexing perspective, YouTube is clearly the winner. YouTube videos get indexed very quickly and Google have access to all the metadata about the video to use for calculating relevancy. However, embedded YouTube videos wont normally give you a video result for your own domain, if that is what you are after. So, best practice really depends on your content and goals with the video - but i would use YouTube if you're trying to get as much exposure as possible and vimeo (only the pro package) if you're trying to get traffic and rankings for your own site.

I normally wouldn't recommend hosting the videos on vimeo and YouTube, but if you do, then ensure the YouTube video is not targeting the same keywords as the page with the Vimeo vid embedded.

You can use VideoObject schema http://schema.org/VideoObject to get rich snippets.

However - a more surefire and common place way to get those video snippets is through a video sitemap, which is how SEOmoz get their search results in the rankings.

Video sitemaps essentially provide the same kinda information as schema, but through the XML sitemap framework, rather than as mark-up in the HTML.

For more details on that, have a look here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472

and then to work out how to make your own sitemap, have a look here: http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/

I hope that answers the question for you!

Yes. YouTube's machine generated transcriptions don't get indexed, but transcripts you upload will. This will then allow your YouTube videos to rank for long tail queries relevant to the text of your transcript (much like page copy). You can also "keyword stuff" your Transcriptions to optimise the video for certain keywords.

NOTE: You can and should keyword stuff in a Whitehat way, not just plough tons of versions of the keyword into the text at random points. What i mean by this is... for example, if you want to rank for the name of the actor performing in your video - then you could append "actor's name: " to any line that they speak. Additionally, you could add some descriptive text explaining what's going on - rather than just copying the recited text.

Domain Authority is logarithmic and compares your site against all of the other sites in the Moz index. Sites can be compared against one another within a specific crawl, but you can't reasonably compare your own site crawl to crawl - since each crawl may end up pulling in information for different sites which therefore adjusts your placement within the overall scheme of authority. Fluctuations between a few points (like 10 and 13) is therefore completely normal.

In short - your authority probably hasn't "decreased", it's just that the index from the latest crawl has a higher median number of LRDs than the previous index.

I hope that makes sense.

As the videos are support related, I assume that their basically to your product/service in some way. If your product is somewhat specific (e.g. a proprietry piece of software or unique product), then you actually want to make sure your videos are hosted securely on your site - so your users come to you specifically for support, rather than going to YouTube.com or Vimeo.com. If you use YouTube or Vimeo to host, they may outrank you for your own videos and you'll find very few users actively search for product support in YouTube or vimeo search.

This means either self hosting your videos, or using a secure third party provider. My personal preference of third party video hosting is Wistia (http://www.wistia.com) but there are loads of good ones out there.

The platform itself doesn't really affect SEO juice, but you will need to ensure anyone embedding the video on a blog also links back to your site as the embeds themselves won't directly pass PageRank.

I hope that's useful!

Hi Jerry,

What you suggest is just about achievable, but it's not very predictable and I wouldn't recommend it.

Firstly, It's quite hard to get rich snippets for embedded YouTube videos - and secondly, if you want the YouTube video to rank again, this video will almost certainly outrank you unless you have an incredibly strong site - as such, you can end up driving traffic that you could have driven to your own site to YouTube - and from there it is extremely hard to drive referrals.

Secondly, While Google may choose to rank both pages, they often will just preference one of the videos - likely the YouTube.com version - which means your site won't rank at all.

Thirdly - The kind of videos that you should be aiming to get your site ranking for, normally conversion related videos - are not the type of content that typically provide any value on YouTube, so you should really consider who the target audience are for your content and whether they're people on your site or people finding the content via YouTube.

However, all this aside, If you really do want to get both a YouTube listing and your own site ranking - then I recommend showing Google that it's two different videos both relevant to the keyword - by self hosting the content  on your own site (or using a paid third party platform) and submitting a video sitemap - then uploading the video to YouTube

However, I want to make absolutely clear that I don't really recommend the above solution from a strategic perspective, as the kind of content you should want your site to rank for is almost never also appropriate to put on YouTube.

Thanks,

Phil.

I would recommend using either Vimeo Pro or Wistia. Both are excellent out of the box solutions that work for link building.

Of these, Vimeo pro is the cheapest, but Wistia is probably better. With wistia's  "superembeds" embed code generator, it allows you to quickly build out your video player style to include social buttons and embed boxes which will help to encourage people to share the content, while ensuring everything is secure and indexable by Google.

1. You won't get punished for duplicate content, but it's still probably not a very good idea  (read here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy for a detailed explanation)

2. No.

More details on the topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

http://www.distilled.net/training/video-marketing-guide/

http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/

Hey,

so there are a number of ways to do this - but the essence of the process has to be about providing Google with a CSV which has all of the sizing/colour information as separate products - while keeping the products on-site non-duplicated.

Having looked through your site, the duplicate content issue is clearly problematic - and bad for users as well as the search engines. My best suggestion for you would be to use Ajax to append sizing/colour to the products - so that the image then updates on the product page when a certain filter is applied. You can then have technically unique URLs for each permutation of the product (which you can use to populate your Google shopping feed) - but these URLs can be pointed back to the generic product URL using the rel=canonical tag.

Therefore, yes, I would recommend deleting all the duplicate products and reworking how the shopping feed relates to the on-site content.

Hope that's useful!

Thanks,

Phil

Hey Joe,

So, as you correctly identify, the YouTube algorithm does appear to be somewhat less sophisticated than the main Google algorithm in terms of spam detection and often times, if you buy loads of links to your videos - you can get them ranking well.

Ultimately, I don't think it really matters where you go to buy these links. The PageRank of those links also wont matter a great deal. At such a scale, one low quality link comment spam link will be more or less as good as another and you're clearly taking the risk in knowledge of a potential penalty. So, i'm afraid I can't recommend you any companies to do this, but hopefully I can give you some other tips which would help with your YouTube optimisation and may help mitigate against some of the risks you will be taking.

• Hotspots

After running numerous tests, we've discovered that the viewing metrics of your videos make a huge different to their ability to rank. YouTube hotspots (see here for details - http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/youtube-insight-film-critic-reviews-for-your-video-now-included/) give a really comprehensive overview of how individuals behave when watching your video and if you can find a way to scale improving the responses here - it should really improve rankings.

• Quantity

4000 videos is an awful lot. Given the scale, I imagine that they're extremely low quality, or duplicate content targeting different keywords. I would really recommend that you consider reducing the quantity here, as the more you scale this process, the easier it is going to be for Google to pick up and then give you a spamming penalty.

• Channel

Whatever you do, don't buy tons of low quality links out to 4000 videos coming off the same channel - this will set off alarms very quickly and sooner or later, the channel will be devalued.

Hope that's helpful - but please do be aware of the risk you're taking here! I fully expect your videos to get a penalty if you buy links to all 4000. You may get away with it for a bit, but please carefully consider whether the cost will really be worth the results.

Cheers,

Phil

Short Answer - you can do it, but it's not very strategic. It will mean that you don't hit any of your possible goals with the maximum effectiveness and ninety nine times out of 100, you won't have content suitable for both driving conversions (which should ve self hosted) and also being popular on the YouTube platform.

• You still risk the problem of potentially having your video outrank your own site if it's optimised for similar keywords
• Embedding the YouTube version on your own site helps to optimise that for YouTube and organic search - using a different embed means you're splitting the potential views across platforms.
• Some of your links will end up pointing to YouTube, rather than your own site.

The problem is ultimately trying to "do everything with one bit of content" when actually a proper video strategy should have your content types segmented into the appropriate channels.

Long answer - read the whole of this post which pretty much covers that exact question in detail. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy

In short - no, this isn't seen as duplicate content at all.

However, you are right in what you say that an embed is more like a link back to the YouTube.com version of your video.

If this is a sort of "blogging" video, expect the YouTube version to rank higher than your post.

More information about Video SEO..... where do I begin?

http://moz.com/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy

http://www.distilled.net/training/video-marketing-guide/

http://wistia.com/learning/advanced-seo-with-distilled

http://moz.com/blog/the-marketing-value-of-youtube

http://moz.com/blog/how-to-leverage-investment-in-video-to-build-more-links

Hi Bill,

I wrote the article you mentioned, so should hopefully be able to help you out!

When I wrote that post in March, I managed to get a secondary authorship rich snippet on a video result through what i could only pin down to tagging a G+ profile as the uploader element, in spite of Google saying  that the uploader profile must be on the same domain. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472#1

Since the flurry of updates earlier this year, this doesn't seem to work any more and indeed, It feels like Google are settling on only providing a single rich snippet for a given result - unless there is the added "+1'd by someone in your Google+ profiles". the standard Rel=author box has also been reduced in size and if you receive multiple results from the same site, then you seemingly now only get one result with authorship mark-up and then the remaining links below.

The main reason for my original recommendation was the possibility of a second rich snippet, with tha "mini-authorship" display which Google were seemingly offering at the time in conjunction with other snippets.

Since this has now seemingly been canned, the recommendation is essentially defunct and so I therefore now Linking video:uploader to a profile on the domain such as http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/author/bill-alderson/ which I imagine will be correct if you're using WP and Yoast's plugin. However, I wouldn't expect adding the uploader element to return anything  specifically for you at the moment, given the way rich snippets currently stand.</video:uploader>

I have updated the blog post to match this advice.

Having rel=author to each page on your site wont affect the way Google read your sitemap, but it may mean that Google elect to show the non-preferential Rich snippet for your page, dependent on the search results. I have seen instances where this has happened on an ecommerce platform with a plethora of schema markup and Google then return authored results for product pages, rather than the ideal star rich snippets.

As long as you have the Page locaton Thumbnail, Title, Description, Content_loc (for .mpg, .mov, .mwv, .mp4 files) or Player_loc for .swf files then Google should have all the info they need to provide rich snippets. Anything above this is ultimately a luxury and if you're relying on automated tools to create the sitemap as you have a large bank of video content - then in honesty, I probably wouldn't worry too much about it.

I am yet to find a decent video sitemap generation tool, so am actually currently in the process of building one. The Wistia sitemap generator you mentioned should do the job just fine for you in the meanwhile.

Cheers,

Phil

Thanks Dana! Spot on - that's exacly what I would say :).

The first thing to say Karl is that, sadly, every bit of software in this space currently sucks.

I've looked into this extensively, for similar reasons as you and unfortunately am yet to find a solution which doesn't irritate me in one major way.

That said, of the ones we've trialed at Distilled so far - our favourite (and my recommendation for you) is join.me https://join.me/

It's a bit fiddly as to have audio as well as video, you need participants to download the desktop app - but it's pretty lightweight, fast and less glitchy than gotomeeting.

Cheers,

Phil.

Hi Lesley,

I know this is what Moz does, but to be honest with you - I'm not convinced this is the best move for them. WBF's on YouTube do very little for them so far as I can tell and overall I think concentrating on one channel (either YouTube or self hosted - dependent on goals) will be more effective.

It's just like trying to have your cake and eat it. Sorry Roger!

However, the Moz example isn't really relevant here anyway, since the content is more "blogging" focused and informational, rather than being tied to a specific product.

Essentially - no..... (unless you want to pay someone to do it for you)

but if you managed to set everything up according to Wistia's SEO guidelines, you should be fine.

I'd normally estimate it'll take 1-2 months for the snippet to show for a medium sized site with reasonable domain authority. For smaller sites, it can take longer and it can appear within a matter of weeks or days for stronger sites.

1. As you say, If you're that concerned about privacy - then you shouldn't make the video available online. It's extremely difficult/nigh-on impossible to stop those who want to pirate something from pirating it; so if you're that bothered, my advice would be don't put the video online.

That said...

RTMP S3 will likely be more secure for you than Vimeo or Wistia, because anyone who researches the way those platforms structure their URLS and unique codes will probably be able to figure out a download link and pull out the content.

2. Wistia's analytics is WAY better, plus it can integrate with GA.

3. Wistia has a ton of tools, called "Labs" and the platform is much more flexible than vimeo in terms of the functionality and embed style. A lot of third party apps will work with both platforms, but it really depends what specifically you're looking to do.

For my money, Wistia is much better than Vimeo Pro across the board, with a much better toolset - but Vimeo Pro is extremely cheap. Ultimately, if you can afford Wistia, I'd go with that.

Hi Ruben,

So - as a rule, I actually don't think a basic animated video is the best kind of video to use to explain things in a whiteboard style. Part of the success of the Moz whiteboard Friday is that it connects people on a personal level to the brand, through videos of the actual Moz staff, rather than through animation which can be a bit cold and alienating - especially for B2B content.

Additionally, Animation is extremely difficult to scale well. If you're trying to do animation with regularity, you're almost certainly going to end up creating content that is low quality - unless you have tens of thousands to spend. There are a load of services out there that will do low priced animation for you (but I won't name them because of what I'm about to say) and in my opinion, the output quality from all of them is extremely generic.

My advice would be to invest in a basic studio set-up and actually start filming videos yourself, like Moz do. It sounds daunting, I know, but it's much more scalable and will pay off in the long term. Some more advice here: http://wistia.com/learning/video-production