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.
Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
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.
Hi Guys,
I'm actually writing a post on this very topic at the moment, which is due to be posted tomorrow on the main SEOmoz blog post. Hopefully that will answer most of the questions you have and we can continue the discussion in the comments if you have any further queries or points.
Cheers,
Phil
Hi Brett,
As far as i am aware, Google has not rolled out this functionality yet, as the instant preview is just a cached image snapshot from the page itself, it's not an actual HTML feed or iframe.
I can imagine the ability to preview vids (especially youtube videos) coming along within the next year or so, but for now you can't watch them without clicking through.
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/
Hey,
So I wouldn't worry too much about the consequence of videos on page speed. The only instance it's going to cause problems is if you embed a large quality of flash content on a single page.
Youtube videos wont cause much issue at all because they are typically embedded using an iframe.
I wouldn't worry about filling pages with rich media too much, it's a good thing to do and wont cause load speed issues unless you have tons of enormous images and hundreds of videos on each page. Use HTML5 players or iframes rather than flash for video and ensure that your code is lean and not pulling in unnecessary files from the server. The most common contributor to page loading times is poor code, particularly badly written javascript.
Cheers,
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.
Hi Donald,
As others have mentioned, it's normally very difficult to get a rich snippet result off the back of an embedded YouTube video, which means your best bet will probably be to take the vids down from YouTube and host them yourself or with a third party provider.
I created a guide last week which gives you step by step instructions for getting your own domain ranking for a video - if you follow those pointers then you should have no problem getting the rich snippets in the SERPs.
Any questions/confusions, please do let me know.
Cheers,
Phil
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.
Hey,
As you correctly indentify - since a standard YouTube embed is in an iFrame, the content loads separately and wont effect site speed. If you choose to use an older style flash based YouTube embed, then this will require a bit of loading, but it wont be significant or anything to be concerned with. However, if you were to have a single page with tons of flash embeds, then this could be slightly problematic - so avoid that and use iFrames where possible.
Phil
Hey Harald,
I'm afraid i don't think the link you've provided there is of much value regarding SEO. While It covers off some of the differences between the two platforms, but doesn't really relate to Vijay's question - which was about indexation and SEO best practice.
Hi Vijay, make sure you're using the old (flash based) vimeo embed code for the video and then use the sitemap below as a template for structuring yours. You need to fill in the gaps for anything written in bold italics.
<urlset xmlns="<a href=" http:="" www.sitemaps.org="" schemas="" sitemap="" 0.9"="">http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9” xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1"></urlset>
<loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/page-containing-video</loc>
video:thumbnail_lochttp://www.yourdomain.com/thumbnail-image</video:thumbnail_loc>
video:titleVideo Title</video:title>
video:descriptionVideo Meta Description</video:description>
<video:player_loc allow_embed="yes" autoplay="ap=1">http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=_VIDEOIDNUMBER_video:player_loc></video:player_loc>
video:duration</video:duration>Length of video in seconds (number only) e.g. 267
video:publication_date2012-02-29T18:30:15+00:00</video:publication_date>
video:family_friendlyyes</video:family_friendly>
video:tagT_arget Keyword 1_</video:tag>
<video:uploader info="<em>https://plus.google.com/userid">Name<strong><span class=" s2"=""></video:uploader>
video:liveno</video:live>
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.
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.
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!
Hey Kevin,
I've asked around, but i'm afraid i haven't been able to find an elegant solution to this. I'm sure it'll get sorted in due course, but for now that isn't much help. I'll let you know if I hear any more ideas on the matter.
Cheers,
Phil
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
Serge,
I'm afraid it does matter what platform you are using to host the videos - the platform will define a lot of elements of the sitemap and method of embedding is also incredibly important.
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 Vijay,
I'll probide you with a sitemap template. Are you using Vimeo Pro? Or just a standard vimeo license?
Thanks,
Phil
Sounds good Rich!
Sorry, i couldn't find the video sitemap! Definitely add that to the robots.txt file as well (assuming it's a separate sitemap).
Yeah - Google don't like the olde multiple videos per page - can only include the one.
Let me know how you get on - i'm an ale man all the way :).
Cheers,
Phil
So, for filming - i have heard good things about this course:
http://centralfilmschool.com/cinematography_intensive_short_course/
These guys also seem to do some nice short courses
http://www.londonfilmacademy.com
Have a look at this post for a n overview - http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/creating-awesome-videos-for-seo/
To learn editing - to be honest, i wouldn't bother going on a course. Just buy the software and plough through all the amazing tutorials on http://www.creativecow.net/ - you'll pick it up fast.
To learn YouTube SEO - firstly look at this post: http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/youtube-seo/
then this deck: http://www.slideshare.net/philnottingham/incorporating-video-into-your-link-building-strategy
There will probably be some YouTube content covered at this years LinkLove & Searchlove - http://www.distilled.net/events/
these meetups - http://www.socialmedialondon.co.uk/ will have people who know a lot about YT stuff.
I hope that's useful. Sorry i can't offer any specific YouTube content creation seminars - there seems to be a gap in the market there!
Following up on my point - If you want to move away from using your own player - then Wistia or Viddler etc is a totally acceptable solution. It's not neccessary - as there are lots of good free video players out there you can use (rather than a paid solution), but it would be a fine way of sorting out the current problems with the JS and lightboxes.
Don't use YouTube though - as any video results will link back to YT - not your domain.
Hey Rich,
So there's a few problems here which i think are preventing your videos from being indexed.
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
Which of the following are you specifically looking to understand:
I can't think of any good seminars that specifically cover YouTube as opposed to just general film and video creation, but may be able to point you in the right direction for some of the above
Mr Stanfield,
I must confess, i am having a similar issue and can't quite work out how to solve it at the moment. http://involver.com/ is a good app the seems to integrate a reasonable (albeit less than perfect) temporary solution as can be seen on the distilled facebook page - http://www.facebook.com/distilled.
I'm going to have a proper look at this and ask around and see if i can work out a proper solution, but currently - YT and FB seem to have updated everything simultaneously and messed up the compatibility. #sadface.
Keep in touch.
Cheers,
Phil
OK, lets take a step back a second.
Syed & BK search - sorry, but YouTube is absolutely the wrong approach here. If you're use Youtube for the content then the SERP results will link back to youtube and not to the target domain.
Tim - Brightcove is totally fine and you're doing everything right from what you describe. It could be a minor sitemap error or perhaps a general technical issue that's preventing the videos from being indexed.
Can you send me a link to the site in question and one of the video pages? If you don't want to reveal it publicly, then feel free to PM me or drop me an email.
Cheers,
Phil
Hey Juan,
I'm afraid there's no easy solution to this one. Google only allows you to submit one video per URL in the sitemap, which makes it tricky for anyone who has a dedicated video page on their site.
Think of it as like traditional keyword targeting - you can't try and target the hundreds of keywords with the same page content and simply having an index of videos shouldn't be able to change this.
My suggestion would be to create new pages for each of your videos - targeting all on-page elements to the relevant keywords for the videos while providing some supporting text and images. Use these pages to define the URL element in your video sitemap and then just submit the indexed page with a single video element. You should then be able to get video results for all the relevant terms, albeit not to a single page.
If you really need users to land on your video index page, then you could think about adding rel=canonical to all the individual pages, but i'm not sure how this would play out regarding video results. Perhaps better would be just to ensure they can access the video index page from the landing pages using good internal linking.
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
Hey Adam,
I'm afraid i'm a bit confused by your question. Are you looking for seminars run by YouTube? Or just seminars/conference that cover creating content for YouTube?
Thanks,
Phil
Aeronet offers some great suggestions, i just have a couple of additional resources to recommend:
if you're uploading to YouTube, Caption Tube is a nice service which makes it quick to create a closed caption file. Also, if you host with Wistia, they will create the files for you at a (pretty reasonable) price of $5 per minute of video.
For general transcriptions through audio, video and all express scribe is a great bit of software - though make sure you also get the foot pedal!
Hey Ross,
I will try and offer some advice point by point:
1. If it's a good blog and the content gets regularly indexed, then it can absolutely be worth doing another guest post to get more links. In these instances, often it's a good idea to link to other pages on your site and to vary the anchor text across the board. While you will always want to ensure part of your link building efforts go towards getting a variety of links from different domains, having 4-5 nice links across the domain will invariably be better than getting just one. Definitely work to maintain any guest blogging relationships you have - those are hard to come by! I'm afraid it doesn't work link a "one site, one vote" system.
2. It depends on the blog, the content and the context - but it ultimately wont make a huge difference either way. Rather than focussing on the position of the link in terms of placement within the code - think about choosing the placement of the link from an audience perspective. Where would the user want to see a link to my website? If your guest post happens to focus around the specific service your company offers, by all means put in some relevant links within the flow of the page copy - ensuring the words around the link are somewhat keyword focussed. If your guest post content is less related to your business, then just put a couple of links in the author box profile, within a sentence explaining what your site does. This sentence will provide some relevancy. I normally aim to get one branded link to the home page and one anchor text link to a deep page for any guest post content.
3. No, not necessarily. Back a few years ago, this was a common assumption, but the value of a link is not worked out on a higher/lower scale. Footer links and sidebar links are generally thought to be less valuable than good contextual links, but the exact positioning of the links makes little difference. The exception to this, however, is when a page is massive and contains dozens of links within a great deal of text. In these instances, its generally preferable to be first rather than last on the list - but those sorts of links are typically not the kind you have control over anyway.
Hope that's helpful!
Thanks,
Phil.
Cool.
To be honest, it really doesn't matter a great deal. i would be inclined to go down the subdomain route - just because it makes it easier if you want to shift things up and move them to another domain later on, but that's entirely personal preference.
Often video files are hosted on totally different domains, such as when you're using a 3rd party player and hosting solution and it doesn't seem to make any difference with regards to getting good video results.
Hey Ryan,
I'm just want to be clear that i understand what you're planning here. Are you going to embed the videos on product pages across the site, but are wondering whether the actual video files (the .mov/.mp4 files) should be held on a subdomain or subfolder?
Thanks,
Phil
Hey Tommy,
So for Vimeo videos, you actually don't need to include the a video:content_locelement in the sitemap</video:content_loc>, but rather reference a player location for the content with the video:player_locmark-up.</video:player_loc>
Google don't actually need you to include both elements, as explained here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472
Vimeo's Flash or HTML5 iFrame player won't simply playback the uploaded content, but delivers a compressed version at a variable bitrate - so the original file is actually not the one you want the sitemap to reference. Moreover, Google cannot get through the Vimeo's cloud storage system and browse the original files anyway.
The player location can be picked out of the embed code you have used for the video - and should look something like:
http://player.vimeo.com/video/01013541
You will also probably want Google to be able to embed the video and auto-play it, so the player_loc markup should look like:
<video:player_loc allow_embed="yes" autoplay="ap=1">http://player.vimeo.com/video/01013541</video:player_loc>
You can test you have the right URL, because you should be able to open the player URL when not logged into vimeo and still view the content (it will take up a whole browser window)
Also, for best chances of getting a blended result with your Vimeo vids - ensure (as you have done) that the video is marked as private and not available to view within the vimeo community pages. If you have a vimeo pro account (which you should do if it's commercial content) you will want to disable the community pass. You should also make sure that you have allowed the video to be embedded anywhere (or at least your domain and google.com), but removed the "embed" button from the player in the player settings- as the code created here will only help to build links to your Vimeo account, rather than your actual domain.
For general reference - The video file url will be somewhere on vimeos CDN, and will look something like http://s3.amazonaws.com/videos.vimeo.com/846/293/84629656.mov You can find it by logging into Vimeo, going to the video page and pulling the first part of the URL from the "download this video" link.
I hope that's useful! let me know if you have any other problems/questions.
Cheers,
Phil
Hey Andrew,
So, as far as i am aware you will need unique thumbs and video locations. You might be able to duplicate thumb information, but any duplicate locations will flag as a GMWT error.
There's nothing technically stopping you uploading the same video to your hosting package time and time again and then just placing the duplicate videos on different URLs and submitting a sitemap with unique video:content_locelements despite having duplicate content.</video:content_loc>
However, this isn't a brilliant thing to be doing and sooner or later, Google will work out that you're using duplicated videos and you could then get devalued for it, which will prevent you from getting nice blended video results
There are a few things which will indicate to G that you're duplicating:
Google can crawl elements of audio files.- It's how they ascertain a lot of copyright infringements on YouTube - by matching wave forms.
If you have tons of videos, all of which are the identical length and have identical thumbnails - it's going to be obvious.
If you're using YouTube to host your videos - it will abundantly clear to YouTube that you've duplicated the content, by the inevitably poor hotspots metrics you'll receive and the lack of views. For product videos, as a rule, i would recommend avoiding YouTube for hosting anyway - Wistia is a great option for that sort of stuff.
Duplicate videos are ultimately the same as duplicate body text and are more or less frowned upon by the engines if exercised at too great a scale - especially following Panda. Ideally, you want to be thinking big and aiming for the unique videos - not only from a Search perspective, but also from a CRO and user perspective. No user is going to enjoy browsing the site if they end up watching the same content multiple times.
I contest the idea that you can't scale unique video content easily. You just need to work out which elements can be duplicated and which need to be unique. Always get unique audio - and wrap some stock elements around a small portion of unique footage. I produced the following YouTube series in 1 day. Filmed, cut, edited and uploaded 64 unique videos.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDCBEEAFF5571810B
They're not complicated, flashy or impressive - but they are all unique, full HD and with appropriate metadata, which is the minimum you need to aim for.
If you have thousands of products for an ecommerce site - sure, it might take a few weeks to produce everything. But you'll be much better off for it.
anyway, hope that's helpful!
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/