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Yes, there are lots of benefits.

Outside of the ones mentioned, you can get rich snippet results in the video SERPs (though this is rare) and you can also get "as seen on" attribution, which is a link at the bottom of a YouTube video that links to a curated page on youtube.com where it lists through a number of the YouTube videos featured on that site/blog, pulling in supporting text from the site. these curated pages provide a referring link back to the sites (through a 303 redirect). If you want to get this attribution, i would generally recommend only embedding one YT video on each page.

Hi Ivo,

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think you're really going to struggle to get those snippets removed, especially since you've used YouTube embeds.

It seems that right now, once a video is indexed, it's very hard to get that snippet removed. You can get a difference video snippet indexed for the page, but Google don't seem to refresh the index regularly or re-crawl pages to determine whether the video attribution is still relevant that often either.

In instances where I have managed to get snippets removed, it's often taken months and there doesn't seem to be a huge level of consistency I can point to.

That said, here are my recommendations:

• Submit a new video sitemap with the appropriate pages taken out (don't just remove the old one)
• Take the videos off the page (and you probably want them off YouTube as well in your case).
• Ensure you don't have FB open graph tags or schema tags related to the video on the page.
• Once you've done all this, resubmit the page to GWMT and then hope for the best!

Hi Miguel,

Essentially it depends what you are trying to achieve. If you're trying to get Google to crawl your videos and offer you a video result in the organic SERPs, then you should self-host the videos, or use a third party hosting company such as Vimeo Pro or Wistia. Youtube is great for seeding your content to a wider audience and there's nothing wrong with embedding YouTube videos on your site if you can provide valuable supporting content. YouTube videos also typically rank well in the SERPs - but obviously this wont help the SEO of your main site.

What sort of content do you have? - Hopefully i can help to offer some more specific advice.

Thanks,

Phil

Don't put product videos on YouTube, Vimeo or anywhere public outside of your domain. Commercial content like that inevitably does poorly on YouTube and the negative user engagement metrics will then just suggest to Google that the content isn't high quality and it wont rank anywhere. Moreover, product videos are only really valuable if they're viewed in the context of the product - where users have a clear funnel for conversion.

I would securely host them with a third party platform and then aim to get rankings and rich snippets. While you can mark YouTube videos as "unlisted" in order to stop them being public, the content then won't rank.

Hi Steven,

So - I'm seeing 244 videos indexed for your site and definitely way more than 33 images. (just do a site: search in Google to get some more accurate data about indexation). In this instance, i'd be inclined to suggest that webmaster tools is just not giving you an accurate picture (this is not uncommon) and it will probably fix itself in due course.

One thing to flag, for videos especially, is that it can take a while (weeks) for Google to index the content. I recommend holding out for a month or so more and seeing how things change. If the indexed number starts to increase in Google, irrespective of what webmaster tools says.. then it's fine.

Hey Will,

This sounds like an interesting problem! I'd be happy to look into it fully for you if you're willing to share the URL of the page and the keywords returning the video results?

If you don't want to share it publicly, then feel free to PM/email me and i'll take a look.

Cheers,

Phil

Hi Kyle,

So - I think you should ultimately let the content drive the decision here. You need to consider consider what audience the content will appeal to, where it will perform best and how the content works outside of the context of a supportive page.

Additionally, you need to look at the pages you want to embed the videos on and work out whether these are likely to generate rich snippets/improve rankings with securely hosted video content on Vimeo Pro/Wistia. Is that going to be the best use of the content vs the authoritative YT account they have built up.

My gut is to say that if they've built up a YT channel with 1.5K subscribers and they get up to 20K views per video - then they're clearly doing something well on YouTube and it would be a mistake to take down that content and undo all the good work. While YouTube doesn't necessarily drive traffic to your root domain or provide followed links - it is enormously valuable for branding, expanding an audience base and building out rich page types through embedded YT videos.  Additionally, You also need to check to see if anyone else has scraped the content and uploaded it to YouTube. If they have, there is no point taking it down.

if you split the embedded videos and the YT versions, hosting the embedded ones with a third party - then while you may be more likely to get rich snippets and links - you will prevent the YT videos from doing as well as they can by restricting the overall views to those which took place outside of your site and domain.

Embedded YouTube videos do sometimes provide rich snippets back to the referring domains, especially if you apply schema mark-up, so i'd probably recommend doing that with the historical content and then making a judgement call re future creations dependent on the kind of content it is and what the wider marketing aims of the company are.

Concerning Analytics - the YT analytics are actually pretty good. Hotspots particularly gives you a clear indicator of how the content is performing, so I wouldn't want to suggest switching to a third party for that reason.

Hope that helps! Unfortunately it's hard to make a specific recommendation without knowledge of the company and the content. Video SEO absolutely has to be content driven and I'd hate to recommend something that disintegrated the wider marketing plans.

Cheers,

Phil

Your player_loc tag as an example.com link in it and the file you're pointing to in your content_loc tag is a .swf file, which means that should be a player_loc tag instead.

Other than that, it looks fine.

I have tested this extensively and can confirm that your choice of hosting for the video has no bearing at all on the ranking. Videos are indexed as components of a pagetype, agnostic of the provider. Video results are often given specific places, often third, and a first place result indexed with a video may drop places to fit the aesthetic model.

Google are continually shifting this, so the results will likely fluctuate - with and without rich snippets for a variety of terms.

Extensive testing also indicates that a video result in third typically gets more clicks that first place. Meaning a video result in third is ultimately than a first place result. While your ranking may drop, your traffic will rise. That's not necessarily going to be true across the board, but is a general trend.

YouTube is a poor choice for product videos, as you can't secure them and they will normally perform very poorly in Google organic and YouTube search. YouTube is however, a great choice for videos which are otherwise entertaining or informative.

Google are pretty good at working out when people like video results and when they prefer more generic shopping results and are getting better and better all the time. If users don't click on the video results - then it won't be long before those rich snippets are changed for a more appropriate form.

Hi Lucas,

A couple of months ago i wrote a pretty extensive blog post on this topic. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo I would suggest you have a read through that and see if that helps you to decide the best course of action.

The essence of the answer is - it depends what you want to achieve and what sort of content you are creating. To get your video appearing in the SERP - with a referring link back to your site, you will be better off self hosting, as YouTube will often outrank your site for it's own video otherwise.

Well - your sitemap is fine, except your content_loc and player_loc tags are wrong.

You should replace the file which you reference in the content_loc tag with the current file being referenced in the player_loc tag (which is just an example.com link, which means I assume you used a tool to construct the sitemap). You should then cut the content_loc tag as you don't need it for this specific sitemap.

Hi Charlie,

so - first of all, are you actually losing any traffic as a result of lower rankings? More often than not, while video results may appear lower down in the page to fit in with an aesthetic model - they get a higher click through rate. If you are retaining or increasing overall traffic for those keywords in-spite of lower rankings, then you are actually in a better position than you were before.

The reason for wanting to get higher up in the SERPs is to get more traffic, but if you can get high click through's in 5th with a video than in 1st without - then 5th position is more beneficial. This feels counter-intuitive, but with the expansion of rich snippets and personalised search - we need to start thinking much wider than just rankings. Rankings are only as good as the traffic they provide.

If you are desperate to lose the video rich snippets (which feels like it would be a step backwards), then you could try one of a few things:

• As you mention, use an Iframe to embed. Google probably wont index it (though it's not unheard of!)
• Hide the video with CSS and then have it appear in a lightbox player with a JS trigger.
• Put the video on a separate page and aim to get two results for the same term (one video and one non-video). NB - this is basically self cannibalisation and could backfire, so I wouldn't recommend it, but it might be worth a try.

Google are doing a lot of tests at the moment and are shifting things around in the SERPs based on rich snippets and content type as much as "relevancy". The model of "higher up = better" doesn't really apply any more and so, in your position i would be inclined to hold tight and see where things go in the next few months. If you're getting product video rich snippets, you're probably in a good position and building more links to the pages may help them to appear higher up and with the rich snippets. Its really not clear how things will end up looking in the not too distant future and I would advise against taking a short term strategy to increase rankings if you're not actually losing a significant amount of traffic.

Hope that's helpful,

Phil

There are actually very few Ecommerce companies doing video right in terms of SEO - including My Binding, who get outranked by YouTube for most of their videos. It's worth noting that putting product videos on a YouTube channel is invariably a bad strategy, so I'd look outside of channels and search for some good sites with securely hosted videos on them, rather than YouTube embed.

However, in terms of content, i'd recommend looking at www.appliancesonline.co.uk who I think do superb product videos and have superb product pages all-round actually.

It'll take several weeks and up to a couple of months for Google to crawl your video sitemap. Once you've fixed it, as recommended, you'll need to sit tight and wait for the crawl.

Hi Michelle,

So, my answer here is essentially - "Test some stuff out and see what works." There is no algorithmic preference for the exact placement of video on a page and so the decision should be based on user experience, the kind of videos that you are embedding and the focus of the pages in question.

If you have lots of nice unique product-promoting videos, then my temptation would be to suggest putting them prominently on the page, ideally above the fold, but certainly somewhere eye-catching that drives potential customers to click through and watch.

However, if your videos are essentially going up to support existing articles and enhance the overall quality of the page from Googlebot's perspective, but don't add a great deal to the user experience - then you want to make sure the videos are not too prominently placed.

While putting videos below the fold is one option in this instance, something else you can do to reduce the space they take up is reduce the player frame-size, so they fit in a sidebar, or somewhere away from the main body of content.

Ultimately you need to play to your strengths and the typical audience use cases you deal with. If your videos are really good and convert well - emphasize them, if your videos are somewhat low quality and are just there to offer SEO benefit, then don't emphasize them so much.

Phil

Hey Ryan,

I'm afraid there's no way you're going to get a rich snippet for that page on that site - certainly not without a video sitemap. For a video to be indexed on Mark-up alone (and even with a sitemap to some extent) the site does need to be relatively strong and the page clearly quite relevant. Unfortunately, this means testing on a WP blog like that won't be good enough.

If you have a stronger, bigger site you can play with - then i's recommend creating a random page on that and giving it a go.

Cheers,

Phil.

If Google are pulling in a different thumbnail from the one you're stipulating in your Wistia account, there's likely going to be one of two problems.

1. You embedded the video with an SEO embed before updating the thumb. This means that your schema.org mark-up surrounding the video will contradict with the variation of the thumb submitted in your video sitemap. Google may have chosen the default snippet in the schema, so check to see what's included in the source
2. Your open graph tags are referencing a different image. As OG tags are in the head, they're often the ones Google take as the default for video thumbs.

You may alternatively have issues with Google randomly taking another image from your page to populate the video thumb, which I have seen happen a couple of times, but the above two situations are the most common.

I hope that's useful! If you need help solving the problem, give me a shout and I might be able to offer you some one-off consulting.

Phil.

I don't think Margarita means the "unrendered" files, but rather the video files used within the embedded player - which will be .mp4 or .flv or .mov etc. References to these files are required  as part of a video sitemap as a video:content_locelement. </video:content_loc>

For a strong site (SEOmoz sort of size) you're looking at a week or two.

For weaker sites, it could be a anything up to a few months.

Hey Kate,

That's an interesting Question. I think you may struggle to find someone specifically trained in the requirements you state, as Video SEO and Video optimisation is a very specific skill that only some SEOs will have experience of, and few people working in the technical video space will have even heard of.

That said, I'm sure you should be able to find someone for the role by just advertising for the core competencies required and then training a good candidate up in the specific video optimisation skills, which are fairly simple principles to learn.

I would recommend taking a two-pronged approach to hiring - searching for people in the production space with some web experience and searching for people in the marketing/SEO/web space with video production experience. While your job description has mostly "SEO" type skills, to be a good video optimiser your candidate will also need an understanding of encoding, embedding production and dramaturgy. So..I suggest posting the job here:

• Mandy
• Production Hub
• Skill Set
• Film and TV Pro

Requesting a technical editor with web experience - specifically analytics and HTML.

Then also put the job on http://jobs.inbound.org/ and any other SEO jobs boards you can find, but ask for the core SEO experiences and some video production knowledge, rather than specific YouTube optimisation skills.

Obviously YouTube experience is a bonus, but in my honest opinion, it shouldn't be a pre-requisite because of how easy it is to pick up the basics

Once you've found someone with the core skills - both creative and technical ability, then essentially get them to go through this guide - http://www.distilled.net/training/video-marketing-guide/ and all related links in depth.

However, It is a tough thing to find candidates for and I expect it is going to take you a while to locate the right person. It recently took me about 4 months to find and hire an editor & animator with HTML experience at Distilled and the challenge wasn't getting someone with the right skills, but finding someone who was talented and smart enough to be able to work things out for themselves, try new things and get to grips with the ever changing landscape of online video.

Hope that's somewhat useful.

Cheers,

Phil.

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).

Actually, IMHO, no you absolutely shouldn't do that.

I think Roger (sorry Roger) is doing it all wrong. SEOmoz whiteboard friday should always be on YouTube - rather than using Wistia. SEOmoz don't really have anything to lose by people watching the videos on YouTube rather than SEOmoz.org (so don't really need their own domain to be the one that ranks) - yet separating their traffic means their YouTube viewing figures are really really low compared with the views driven on SEOmoz and as such their YouTube optimisation is pretty poor. Embedding the YouTube versions of the video for this informaional content would help moz to dominate YouTube and likely wouldn't have an adverse effect in terms of traffic or conversions elsewhere - since the community is so strong.

Does that mean you should just use YouTube? No - of course not. Ultimately, it depends on your goals and more importantly, what kind of content you have.

If you have "conversion/sales" focused content - essentially product videos - then they should be self hosted and embedded on the product landing pages. If you have more informational, bloggy kinda content - then you should put this on YouTube and embed the YouTube versions on your site. Don't do both - as you'll cannibalise your overall success on YouTube - while potentially driving traffic there. Either be really good on YouTube or don't bother and then self host.

Ask yourself why do you want to rank with a rich snippet - and then determine which solution is appropriate for you. If it matters that you retain the traffic and get all the links - then your content likely isn't appropriate for YouTube anyway. Conversely, if where the audience views the video wont really matter (does it make sense isolated from your website) and the video is fulfilling a genuine informational query (look at the YouTube keyword tool to see if anyone is searching for relevant keywords) - then go with YouTube.

Hey Tina,

I actually wouldn't worry too much about this, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the site isn't actually linking to you from the video pages with an

That's not actually true Martin.

YouTube very very rarely drives much traffic back to your site. If you want traffic to your site, you're much better off securely hosting the content and driving traffic from Google with rich snippets - rather than forcing users to go to YouTube and then from there navigate to your site.

Hey,

So, the situation is relatively convoluted and there isn't an absolute right answer to what best practice will be, but hopefully I can offer you some useful advice.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "credit" regarding YouTube videos but I assume you mean rich snippets? In this case, it is indeed true that Google don't often give out video rich snippets for embedded YouTube videos, but instead normally just provide a video result that links to the main YouTube domain - however, within the last couple of weeks they have visibly begun to occasionally offer some more rich snippets for embedded YT videos, but only for high authority blogs and where the blog provides a great deal of supporting content.

That said, you should still summit a video sitemap for any embed YT videos you put up, as you are giving google good metadata about your site that helps them to crawl it better. While you may not get the rich snippet, that does not nullify the value of the sitemap.

I'm not quite sure whether in your proposal you plan to host the versions of the videos on your own site with a third party or with YouTube? If it's the latter and you're simply proposing that the metadata on your page focus's on different terms than the YT video itself, then I would advice against it. In this instance, you almost certainly won't get a rich snippet, as in Googles eyes the embedded video will be broadlyl irrelevant to the focus of the rest of the page. However, having versions on your site hosted with a third party i.e wistia (or self hosted) and then uploading the content to YouTube, essentially as a duplicate, but targeting a different term - this can work. Whether its a good idea or not really depends on the content itself and the audience base the site has.

Another point to recommend is that you should never put promotional or commercially focused content on YouTube - always host that yourself or with a secure third party solution. The user engagement metrics on YouTube are critical in determining whether you will rank both on YT and on Google and if the videos appear algorithmically uninteresting - then your rankings will suffer. Only put content on YouTube that users who find the videos through searching on YouTube will want to watch. How-tos and funny content are great, but stay clear of product information or blatant advertising (unless you are doing PPC YouTube advertising).

Hope that's useful, let me know if you have further questions.

Phil.

Written on my iPad, on a train, so sorry for any typos!

What I am right about, is that you need to consider your content type into the equation here and let that influence the technical implementation.

I didn't say "don't put the content on YouTube", but I don't believe anyone can offer you the correct advice until they've had a look at your content in detail, alongside your site and worked out what the best implementation can be. There is no one answer to the "where do I host my video" question - and anyone who offers one without taking the specific content type into consideration hasn't thought it through (That's not to criticise any of the other answers here - but I think they're all too quick to offer you a solution without the proper process of discovery.)

Reread this post http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy

You're currently at the position of the first graphic, where you're letting your goal define the technical implementation - but are completely ignoring the content type within that equation.

You originally said that you want to rank with a rich snippet - but now you say the goal is building links. I can almost guarantee your content won't be suitable for both competitive keyword ranking and building links - so which one is more critical and what sort of content have you created? Is the content suitable for building links? And if so - is it suitable also for the YouTube community? Is anyone on YouTube searching for relevant keywords?

For purely building links, you can go through the path of uploading to YouTube after self hosting that dana mentioned (which i detail in this post http://www.reelseo.com/video-link-bait/) but bear in mind when you do this that you will allow some links to point to YouTube that you otherwise may have been able to get back to your site. It may also mean YouTube outranks you for the video for a time, until you reclaim the links and take it down

The technical implementation will always be a compromise and I suggest that you'll be best off nailing down what it is you really care about and what the content's suitable for, rather than hoping for everything with one series of content.

Does that make sense?

I disagree with your assessment and advice here.

Through vimeo pro (which isn't the same as vimeo - confusing, i know) you can get your own site to rank rather than YouTube.com or Vimeo.com, which would likely be the preferable option here. Linking them together then becomes a bad idea - since it makes little sense for users.

Additionally, Google won't rank whichever it thinks is the original, as it has no mechanism to work out whether videos hosted on different platforms are the same thing. In such situations, Google actually rank whichever page is stronger and more relevant - which, for any site with a fairly weak domain - is normally the YouTube.com version.

That sounds like a nice idea and will work nicely for users - you'll just need to consider whether you would rather the YouTube videos or the pages on your site rank for the targeted keywords and optimise everything accordingly. There aren't any duplicate content risks there.

What i mean by "your content won't be suitable for both competitive keyword ranking and building links" is that the kind of video you'll want to create and embed on an important keyword landing page is probably not the kind of content that people are actually going to link to. It's extremely rare to find a video that will serve that landing page well (likely by being fairly commercial in nature) and a video that lots of people will want to link to (by being useful, informational or entertaining). That's not to say it's not possible, but I have never ever seen it executed successfully.

If your goal is basically just getting these rankings so you can drive traffic that may then link to you - then yes, I would recommend using Vimeo Pro or similar (if you're using vimeo pro, Disable the community pass). If no-one is searching for those general topics on YouTube - it's probably not going to be worthwhile putting your content on there. You can test it, of course - but make sure that the metrics you're tracking are traffic from YouTube and engagement on the platform. It's easy to get swayed into thinking YouTube is useful because of high view counts - but views are essentially just "hits" and there's no way of knowing whether those views could have been driven to the version on your site instead.

When you embed the content, you'll also need to provide a custom embed code for others that includes a textlink back to your site - as the standard vimeo embed code will only link back to vimeo.com

As long as all the text content is visible in the HTML and is accessible for users - then you'll be absolutely fine.

The CSS Display none method is normally a good solution.

However... for numerous reasons I agree with Mike that you shouldn't have all the videos and transcripts on a single page. Have you looked at possibly using HTML5 pushState as an alternative solution?

+1 RB.

RB is a boss.

Hey Craig,

In short - it sounds like you're doing everything right and I'd be inclined to question the indexation stats  first rather than the method you've implemented.

Q1) Neither are a major factor in the video getting indexed. Indexation on that front is essentially binary - it's either indexed, or Google doesn't accept some of the inputted tags and then won't provide a rich snippet

Re - deindexing old ones and indexing new ones, i think that's exactly what's happening. If you refresh all the content and the sitemaps, it will take a while for Google to crawl through and reindex everything properly.

I'd advise just sticking with it for now and waiting a few weeks to see if you can get everything indexed as it should be. If you've got some of the new videos indexed - then it means your implementation is correct and you'll probably just need to be patient given the amount of content you've got.

Additionally, I wouldn't trust the Google webmaster tools data on indexation either - it's notoriously unreliable and may be undereporting the amount of videos you actually have in the search results.

Cheers,

Phil.

I don't think there's a solution to show both simultaneously, but you may find with your implementation that the rich snippet given varies on a keyword basis.

I would suggest from tests I've done that the video snippet would tend to be preferenced, but I don't have statistical significance to suggest there's any rule there.

My advice for actions going forward would be to remove the video schema on a subset of test pages and then compare percentage traffic increases/decreases across these pages from when they had video snippet vs stars. Which one will perform better for you will likely vary greatly dependent on the type of pages in question and the vertical you're in. Once you've got enough data to work out whether video or stars perform better on a per page-type basis.. e.g. maybe for product pages, stars get more clicks, but video snippets get more clicks on category pages, you can start to push out the appropriate mark up on each pages.

I'd therefore advise that you think in terms of "not having your cake and eating it", instead working out what works best in each instance and focusing on that, rather than trying to put all the markup on all the pages.

Hey Craig,

Unfortunately it's really difficult for me to offer you a decent answer for this blind (without trawling through the site and sitemaps) - but I expect that it's just a waiting game, yes.

If you've updated all your video embeds and the sitemaps to match that - then essentially Google need to recrawl and verify all your pages and videos. This will take time, especially for the number you're talking about - as, yes, Google will see these as new videos (they technically are).

There isn't a way to go back on this either, as if you've refreshed all your content and sitemaps - Going backwards Google will still need to recrawl everything.

I don't know how long you've been waiting - but I'd expect it to be a couple of months before everything is as it was, and that's if your site is SEOmoz kinda strengh - so DA90 odd..

Basically - I'd recommend just tracking this week by week and seeing if things improve. Make sure all the Sitemap entries are referenced via robots.txt as well as WMT and then hold tight. If you're still not having all the videos indexed after a couple of months, then you might need to drill down a bit deeper.

Cheers,

Phil.

I've never heard of that happening and to be honest, I'd be extremely surprised if adding aggregrate review mark-up to category pages (providing it was relevant and legitimate) triggered any sort of penalty. If the mark-up was essentially a bit deceptive or irrelevant, I could potentially see a manual reviewer giving the site some sort of page level penalty, but I've never heard of this happening and would be suspicious of such assumptions.

Vimeo is OK, as long as you "disable" the community pass. If the videos are visible on vimeo.com, then it's essentially the same as putting it on YouTube and vimeo.com will get the credit

Hi Sheldon,

I'm afraid I completely disagree with your advice here. When i say "self hosting" this doesn't necessarily mean you have to host the content on your server - using a CDN will do the same job from an SEO perspective and not come with any of the bandwidth concerns.

However, if you don't want to self host, the alternative - as I mentioned - is to use a paid third party solution such as Vzaar, Wistia, Vimeo Pro, Brightcove, Ooyala etc... not YouTube

YouTube is essentially a social platform and can outrank you for your content if you're trying to drive traffic. Additionally, if you content isn't relevant for a YouTube audience - it'll do very poorly on the platform since the user engagements metrics will suggest that the content is substandard.

It's only true if there's actually a text link back to your site included underneath the embed code itself - which the standard vimeo embed does not provide.

If you'd like to rank for the videos, I recommend disabling the community pass straight away, as otherwise Vimeo.com can outrank you for your own video.

Hi Sheldon,

I've written about this extensively, but there are definite concerns about YouTube outranking your content and it can happen irrespective of the number of views garnered. Raw views are not a ranking factor on YouTube - so virality is not the only instance of a YouTube video outranking the page it's embedded on. Imagine, for example, how Google should calculate which page should rank if the page is embedded across multiple sites all optimised for the same keyword.

Now..I'm not saying YouTube is never the appropriate hosting solution - far from it - but I am saying that the reasons you would choose self hosting preclude YouTube from being a viable alternative. YouTube should only be used where content is consciously created for the platform, in order to take advantage of the social visibility it offers.

For more information  - first watch this video: http://wistia.com/learning/advanced-seo-with-distilled

then read the following posts:

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

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

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

I hope that helps clarify things.

Absolutely 100% not at all, no. Don't do it.

Also ignore all the advice you might read about this on sites like ReelSEO, because they're completely wrong.

Putting product videos on sites like YouTube, Vimeo etc is very bad idea for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, those videos can then outrank your actual product pages for branded keywords in organic search with the versions of the video on the social sharing sites. This can obviously mean you wont get as much traffic or as many conversions as you deserve

Secondly - they almost certainly wont provide any value on the social sharing sites. No-one goes to a social video site with commercial purchasing intent, or to really find out about specific products very often - meaning the audiences wont appreciate your content.

It's normally better to target social video sites with informational content rather than product videos.

I'm 90% positive it's because you've hidden the video code itself behind a JavaScript trigger, so Googlebot struggles to see it.

While you used to be able to get videos indexed just with a video sitemap, Google have got slightly better at working out whether that sitemap actually corresponds to content in the HTML, but if you've used JS to execute the embedded video, you're likely to find that it won't get indexed.

So, I'd recommend looking at fixing that implementation and potentially see if you can do it just with CSS, or shift the page around so the embed loads up when the page does, not after a secondary trigger.

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.

No, you can't migrate the video.

in terms of embedding - an iframe is super lightweight. Just embed a YouTube iframe and you should be fine.

Your schema implementation seems fine, but I'd also recommend creating a video sitemap if you struggle with indexation, since this is typically a more surefire way of getting the videos indexed. The YouTube embed may also be confusing for Google with regards to "which video do i index", so a video sitemap would help with this as well.

However.... my main comment regarding the question of further value and improving rankings would be that you seriously need to look at your page types and the quality of the content you're creating.

I want to say this in the nicest possible way... but that video, and the page structure as a whole, is pretty bad. The video is incredibly slow moving and actually doesn't provide any valuable information, which could actively harm your conversion rate and bounce rate rather than help matters. I'd suggest you next spend time looking to improve your site design and structure - which should help improve your conversion rate. Following this, It'll be much easier for you to do things like link building which will help increase rankings.

I have no idea where the "video is 50 times more likely to get organic page ranks in Google than plain text results" comes from, but it's completely not true and doesn't even make sense.

I don't think there's a weighting factor that says "if this is a video, it should rank higher", but having rich media like video, on a page, does correlate slightly with better rankings. This does not mean there is necessarily any causal relationship though.

What is true, however, is that having a video snippet can dramatically affect click through rate (both positively and negatively), which can then affect rankings. I don't have any up to date numbers on this, but Im wary of actually listening to the numbers at all for this kind of question, because so much depends on market, the site, the intention of the page and the quality of the thumbnails.

Instead of thinking "if i get video results, will i rank better", you should instead take a step back and work out whether or not it will help from a user perspective to have video on the page, and if so, whether or not video thumbnails will be a virtue or a vice. There is a tool which we use to determine this at Distilled, called SERP Turkey, which was built by our head of R&D - go check it out.

Some general remarks - I think the quality of the thumbnail is a huge overriding factor here that rarely gets talked about. i've seen numerous examples of rankings have dropped when snippets have been implemented and usually this correlates with having very low quality and unappealing thumbnails. If you're thinking of investing in video, I cannot overemphasize how important it is to get a great, eyecatching thumbnail in place, rather than something generic.

You should instead take a step back

I actually don't think you should make the judgement regarding what needs changing yourselves - or take my word for it either! That said, I agree that the points you mentioned are particularly problematic

Your initial starting point should be to source some data from actual users and user testing groups regarding their perceptions of the site - particularly looking at what may have prevent conversions or almost stopped people from converting. There's tons of information about this stuff (CRO) online - but I'd start with running the Panda questionnaire that i mentioned previously and then use http://www.usertesting.com/ to source some good feedback from a wider selection of individuals.

From here - you should then hire a designer or get a freelancer in, who can action this stuff and come up with a refreshed design.

Nope, they can't. Those links are within the iframe.

If you're trying to get link equity from embedded video, it'll need to be with crediting text links or images outside of the actual player, as overlays are done with JavaScript, which doesn't pass PageRank by all accounts.

Hi Vadim,

not to pick on you at all, because I think you've given a great answer - but I want to generally object to the suggestion of using things like Animoto and Wideo etc... because the kind of content you get in return, while it's scalable and low cost, it's also really low quality and incredibly generic.

IMO, if your video doesn't speak to the USP of your product or your brand in some fundamental way, It's not worth doing. I know that's a hardline to take, especially with SEOs who often, sadly all want to do everything as cheaply as possible and don't care too much about quality -- but I really think you're always better off following your second suggestion and finding a talented freelancer or student who can build out something customized and uniquely valuable for you. The cost shouldn't be prohibitively greater and you'll get way more for your money in the long run.

Google see iframes as basically "a window into other sites". As such, no, they don't crawl links in this way - however, they will likely then crawl the page which the iframe references, and thereby pick up any backlinks there.

I'm not quite sure how this might related to an embedded YouTube video, but YouTube videos are indexed instantly anyway once they're published because Google don't need to crawl YouTube (they have access to the database)

Hey Dan,

In short - no, I don't think is going to be a problem for you. YouTube are aware that their auto-generated transcripts are often inaccurate, so I don't imagine you're going to find that profanity coming up there has any effect on the categorization of the video. That said, It's really easy to fix by just uploading your own version of the transcript, which will take precedence over the autogenerated one. ThompsonPaul has given a great explanation of a quick and easy way to do that also on this thread.

In terms of a channel trailer, once you log into your YouTube account, under the "Home" button, there should be a massive icon called "Channel Trailer" with a blue button, which will allow you to upload a trailer or choose one from your library.