You're most welcome!

Videos using a lightbox will sometimes get indexed - it really depends on whether or not Google manage to execute the JS - and this really depends on the whole site architecture. It might be an issue for you, it might not.

My gut is that the main issue at this stage is just time, so I'd definitely give it a few more weeks before taking any further action.

From personal experience, I would be extremely surprised if the position of the video has anything to do with it - "the fold" is a much less concretely defined concept than it once was and your videos are perfectly prominent on the page.

Hi Michelle,

So - firstly, a week is not enough time to determine whether there is a problem with indexation. Videos can take weeks and even months to get indexed, even with all the appropriate mark-up applied, and so I'd recommended at least holding fire for a few more weeks before being too concerned.

However... there are quite a few things on the page in question which could confuse Googlebot and therefore pose problems for you. Firstly, you've embedded the same video twice on the page - once in a lightbox behind a JavaScript Trigger, and then once just embedded into the page. It's hard to know whether Google will be able to execute that JavaScript successfully, but it's highly possible this double embed could confuse Googlebot (and confuse users!). Is there any particular reason why you've embedded the video twice? Secondly, you've also embedded a load of YouTube videos at the bottom of the page. YouTube videos get indexed on the pages they're embedded on instantly, but don't often rank with rich snippets in the blended organic results. This is also a fairly confusing signal to Googlebot, where the "one video per page" model still seems to be the most effective way of getting everything indexed correctly.

I hope that's useful!

Phil

Are you able to share the site in question?

I'll happily take a look into it for you.

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.

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.

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

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.

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