Duplicate Video Onsite - How do you treat this in Sitemap?

[andrewv]

How would you handle multiple pages using the same video content? As sometimes it does not make sense to have new videos for every product so you re purpose.

Will you still get the effects in search results if the thumbs and video location is duplicated for some product urls?

[PhilNottingham]

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:

• Audio Wave forms.

Google can crawl elements of audio files.- It's how they ascertain a lot of copyright infringements on YouTube - by matching wave forms.

• Video Lengths

If you have tons of videos, all of which are the identical length and have identical thumbnails - it's going to be obvious.

• YouTube Hosting

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