Hi,

The video being too far down the page might be an issue. I've seen this cause problems before, and in your case I think it could be a problem. More broadly though, I don't think you should have those videos on the category pages, because the video itself is just image slideshow and actually does more to hamper the using experience rather than help it. As rich snippets aren't common any more, I don't think you're going to get much value from having these videos on those pages.

Having the sitemap hosted at Wistia isn't a problem. You can point to a sitemap hosted on any site.

Other likely problems are duplicate content. You seem to have significant duplicate content issues as I'm seeing about 3 variations of that page indexed.

Hope that's useful,

Phil.

That test in no-way proves that the link passed PageRank.

I'm not sure about an href within an iframe, but equally I don't see any reason why you would do that?

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.

Not quite sure I understand... Are you trying to build links to the YouTube video on youtube.com? if so, an embed through an iframe does sort of count as a "link" to the video (i.e. it provides ranking equity), but only in the unique case of YouTube videos.

Or are you wondering if links in the descriptions/overlays will pass PageRank?

I wrote that post, and it's now nearly three years out of date.

They have got better at crawling iframes since then, and now you can get a video indexed if it's embedded in an iframe.

However, I don't think this relates to the question specifically?

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)

Having rich media types (i.e. images, video, interactive elements) does appear to correlate slightly with higher rankings, but at best it's going to be a minor ranking signal at best. I don't think having video on a page is necessarily a good signal that a page has value, since there isn't a barrier to entry to embed YouTube videos and there are a lot of very low quality sites out there that just exist to scrape and embed YouTube videos.

In short, no I wouldn't suggest moving to YouTube on the basis of SEO generally - though obviously it's hard for me to offer any more specific advice without further context.

Start by working out A) if your content will be valuable to an audience who find it through YouTube search/recommended videos B) What your main goals are for each of your videos.

Cheers,

Phil.

Hey Scott,

So I'm actually going to go one better here to try to respond to this question adequately and am going to write a blog post which will be published on the Moz blog tomorrow at this URL - http://moz.com/blog/video-seo-post-rich-snippets

Hopefully this post will shed some light on the choices you're facing and the decisions you should make. However, I did want to just quickly cover off one misunderstanding with this issue.

Embedding YouTube videos won't make your own pages rank higher compared with ranking videos from other providers. Just because Google owns YouTube doesn't mean ranking benefit is given to sites which embed YouTube videos (do you know how many terrible scraper sites are out there?!) in just the same way sites are not given preference for using Google AdSense on their site as opposed to other advertising platforms (in fact - Panda was designed to penalise those sites which are there just to generate ad revenue without provide value).

The decision about whether to move from Wistia should not be based on whether you will rank higher or not, since neither option will fundamentally make a difference. It may end up being wise, in your instance, to start using YouTube - but only if you can see benefit to having an audience watch the videos on YouTube.com and subsequently not visit your site.

Determine what the best user experience will be - and you'll probably end up with the right strategic answer.

Cheers,

Phil.

I am entirely biased, as I help organise the conference and I am speaking, but yes, I believe it to be extremely good value for money.

I speak at conferences around the world on a regular basis and, truthfully, I don't think anywhere has matched SearchLove in terms of the quality and depth of the presentations. We are extremely passionate about providing the best possible learning experience for attendees and I think we get better and better each year.

Having already seen snippets of the presentation ideas from David Sottimano and Ade Lewis, I can promise the conference will be absolutely superb.

Sure! Have read of this one http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy

Just on the "unlisted" question - the problem with doing this is that you then lose almost all of the value of having the videos on YouTube in the first place, yet still have to deal with sub-optimal analytics. Similarly, you can use the YouTube API with a third party player, but the only value you then get from YouTube is free hosting (but with sub-par tracking).

If you won't want to adjust the technical implementation of the videos - I'd recommend just using an XML video sitemap, rather than Schema.org mark up to provide metadata about your videos.

You can use the gallery_loc tag to account for playlists.

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.

You don't need to include them no, and You can't include a sitemap entry for a YouTube video page anyway, only individual pages on your own site.

You can choose to include embedded your YouTube videos in your video sitemap if you wish - (Tutorial for you here: https://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/) But this isn't the best strategy to take if you're trying to get rich snippets (see here: http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy)

I hope that's useful!

It's hard to offer really concrete advice without a bit more information on the specific context in question, but here are some general pointers:

1. You probably shouldn't duplicate the content across YouTube channels. You can't Geotarget YouTube channels and in practice, this is not really any different from having duplicate content across multiple websites. If you do duplicate the content, you'll cannibalise the effectiveness of the videos ranking on both YouTube and Google organic searches, plus you'll split the view count which will harm your YouTube optimisation.
2. Absolutely 100% do not put the sales focused product videos on YouTube - as in doing so you'll drive traffic to YouTube instead of your own site, which means you're adding an unnecessary step in the conversion funnel which will probably cost you money. You cannot sell from a YouTube channel and external links on YouTube get extremely low click through rates, with very very few people going to YouTube to search for products to buy (you only go to YouTube to watch a video). There is a bit more information about this for you in these links: http://moz.com/blog/the-marketing-value-of-youtube , http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy, http://moz.com/videos/view/2013/building-a-winning-video-marketing-strategy
3. Annotated external links do not get clicked very often, I wouldn't rely on this as a strategy at all. It basically won't work.
4. You can't geotarget annotations, no.

So, in short - I probably recommend just having a single channel and only putting the entertaining videos on YouTube. bear in mind that YouTube doesn't drive much traffic, so your goal here should be brand awareness, not traffic acquisition.

I hope that's useful!

Thanks,

Phil