Friday, July 16, 2010 at 9:20 AM
Webmaster Level: AllWe know that some of you, or your clients or colleagues, may be new to online video publishing. To make it easier for everyone to understand video indexing and Video Sitemaps, we’ve created a video -- narrated by Nelson Lee, Video Search Product Manager -- that explains everything in basic terms:
Also, last month we wrote about some best practices for getting video content indexed on Google. Today, to help beginners better understand the whys and hows of implementing a Video Sitemap, we added a starting page to the information on Video Sitemaps in the Webmaster Help Center. Please take a look and share your thoughts.
27 comments:
I see Google Video always redirecting to the website containing the video. Is the "allow_embed" attribute of the "video:player_loc" element still useful in the video sitemap?
The "allow_embed" tag used to be required when we embedded videos. Since our focus is on search, we direct all users to 3rd party sites, now the attribute is optional.
Not too long ago Matt Cutts suggested encapsulating each video on a site in its own web page so meta content and text could be used to describe the video to the bots. Is this still a best practice or can webmasters simply use a sitemap now with the same effect as is suggested in the video?
Thanks in advance
Yes, These techniques of Video sitemaps is really effective and helpful for all online marketing experts who using video as big tool for better traffic and online reputation.....
Thanks Nelson....
@Amy MacIsaac great post ..
thank you bery much.
Thanks for the info, recently I submitted an xml sitemap to Google Webmasters Tool. I'm amazed with what info I could get...perhaps because I'm new to this tool and not really a techie guy. There's more to learn.
How do you go about creating a Video Sitemap for your website when you host your videos on Youtube?
Thank you for this video. It gives me a signal that video sitemaps are important for google and we can build on this (to start creating tools to generate video sitemaps).
A question: what do you exactly mean with "raw" video file? Sometimes you don't have the direct path to the video file but only to flash player (with parameters for an individual video).
How does Google exactly know "ok, there is a valid video I can take in my index"?
Thank you for answer!
@Waldemar, similar to ranking, we do not discuss externally our validation methods.
However, I want to emphasize the two different tags associated with the video location: content_loc and player_loc. Content_loc specifies the location of the actual video file (e.g., .flv) and player_loc the player file with corresponding arguments that will load the video (e.g., .swf).
Note that we require only one of the two but strongly recommend both.
@Dominic,
For YouTube videos you have embedded on your site, you would need to only supply the player_loc which you can get from the "embed" code on your YouTube playpage.
Quick question, I don't see any field to specify the video language, is it somehow inferred from the landing page meta-tags? Guessed from the video itself? Am I missing something?
Thanks for the video.
When building backlinks to a video on a sitemap is it more effective to use the video url or the page or blog post on which the video is displayed?
Thanks in anticipation
Andy
Amy, great post. Being new to SEO and webmastering my own site, I'm definitely bookmarking this blog and coming back daily. I will definitely put this information regarding videos to good use.
Google always is kind in indexing my videos on the top pages of searches. I love having this kind of exposure.
This is good news, since I'm a Video Producer and want to utilize the web more for marketing purposes. I too, will be coming back to this site.
You have an excellent website!! Keep it up and drop by my Blog to see some of the best articles and websites around the Net:
http://quick-reads.blogspot.com
See you there!
Great article and does help a lot. I do have a question regarding video sitemaps, hope readers here can answer it. I recently posted a video on my celeb photo site (Its a papparazi video of charlie sheen arguing with his former wife Denise Richards in Prague and almost hits her on the face). How can I integrate my sitemap fully into the video?
I have been working towards the creation of a video sitemap - generated in xml for one of our larger, consumer oriented sites. we currently have 10's of thousands of videos. I cannot seem to find anyplace to get the document validated. Can someone direct me to a place where i can validate my video sitemap for submission to google? or someplace i can get a downloadable validator.
Good info to note. Video will just continue to grow in use and glad to see Google taking steps to make sure its searched efficiently.
Thanks.Did you know that creating videos and posting them online is fairly inexpensive.It's also important to make your video interesting with good quality content but make sure to keep them short.
what do you mean by raw video file ?
Can we have the information in textual form please, it is much more helpful to present it as text than as a video.
Good vid. I'd be interested to see ways webmasters can cooperate with Google and earn points (as it were) thereby making their sites more attractive to Google.
I've got to say, it's far too cool that Google helps us know it better
such a useful video to get the better knowledge regarding video sites. Thanks.....
@Nelson, for youtube videos posted on other sites player_loc is not working. Google indexes sitemap without errors, also it's indexes page, but not shows up results for videos, only for page. No videos for that page ar shown. Looks like it's not supported for youtube videos. Just test it and you'll see... Any ideas?
I have read the article,and I want to say thanks to you for exceptional information. You have provided deep and easily understandable knowledge to us.
Hi everyone,
Since over a year has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Central Help Forum.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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