Video xml sitemap: how to build with 1000 videos on your site?

Discountvc

Hey Mozzers,

We have a vacation rental site where every property has its own video of the property. (i.e. YouTube embedded video)

So, with more than 1000 homes, how do you make a video xml map?

Or, should we have an xml map with 1000 links on it?

Can't wait to see your insights!

Vahe.Arabian

From looking at Google Webmaster Tools forums, they have said you can have a maximum of 50,000 URLs which I am assuming applies when you create a video sitemap.

There are software/tools which you can use to create specific video sitemaps online. Here's a page I found to create video sitempas using A1 sitemap generator - http://www.microsystools.com/products/sitemap-generator/help/video-xml-sitemaps/

Make sure that you review the thumbnails and meta data used as it is important for how it appears in SERPs and the nature of users click through.

Other resources

Creating sitemaps using externally hosted videos - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/video-sitemap-guide-for-vimeo-and-youtube a cool one from one of the Mozzers
Here was a previous QA post on video sitempas - http://www.seomoz.org/q/video-sitemaps

Hope this helps,

Vahe

Discountvc

Perfect, thank you Vahe.

PhilNottingham

Only thing i have to add from Vahe's answer Peter is that you probably shouldn't use YouTube for this.

The Hotspot graph metrics for an "advert" style video like you're building will probably be very low, as will the overall views and this will cause Google to see it negatively and not rank it. If you use a service like Vzaar - http://www.vzaar.com or Wistia - http://www.wistia.com then you're probably more likely to get a good blended video result. With Wistia, you can also automatically add content to your sitemap, so i expect this will be a great way to go for you.

Cheers,

Phil