How can I make sure Google is crawling a link from an iframe (video)?

[zpm2014]

Do they crawl backlinks from an iframe example from a Youtube video embedded in a blog post? TIA!

[RyanPurkey]

This post is fairly extensive in regards to your question and should give you ideas even beyond what you're asking here,  http://moz.com/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo but if you're looking for the highlight, this is still pretty applicable advice today:

Embed the content with HTML5 and JavaScript or Flash, but not an iframe

Unfortunately, Google are not very good at crawling iframes at the moment; so if you want videos to be indexed, you need to make sure you’re embedding content in an HTML5 player with Flash fallback, or a pure Flash player.

If the video is being embedded on your own site you can also create a transcription for it on the same page and then place the links in according spots.  Cheers!

[zpm2014]

Thanks Ryan! These videos will be embedded in other websites.

[PhilNottingham]

Google see iframes as basically "a window into other sites". As such, no, they don't crawl links in this way - however, they will likely then crawl the page which the iframe references, and thereby pick up any backlinks there.

I'm not quite sure how this might related to an embedded YouTube video, but YouTube videos are indexed instantly anyway once they're published because Google don't need to crawl YouTube (they have access to the database)

[PhilNottingham]

I wrote that post, and it's now nearly three years out of date.

They have got better at crawling iframes since then, and now you can get a video indexed if it's embedded in an iframe.

However, I don't think this relates to the question specifically?

[RyanPurkey]

Ah, ya, since OP is asking about these videos after they're embedded in other sites maybe he means will this be like link building?  Or maybe he's asking about view lift and popularity of the original video?  OP, I think you'll need to clarify some to get a more precise answer.

[zpm2014]

This is for link building, Ryan. Do you think Google will still follow the links from an iframe?

[PhilNottingham]

Not quite sure I understand... Are you trying to build links to the YouTube video on youtube.com? if so, an embed through an iframe does sort of count as a "link" to the video (i.e. it provides ranking equity), but only in the unique case of YouTube videos.

Or are you wondering if links in the descriptions/overlays will pass PageRank?

[zpm2014]

We created videos that will be embedded to other sites and we have to take advantage of the backlinks.

Regarding Youtube videos, it was just another question if Google can crawl backlinks (the hyperlinked Youtube logo within a video embedded to an external site or webpage) of a Youtube page.

[PhilNottingham]

Nope, they can't. Those links are within the iframe.

If you're trying to get link equity from embedded video, it'll need to be with crediting text links or images outside of the actual player, as overlays are done with JavaScript, which doesn't pass PageRank by all accounts.

[zpm2014]

So this test is not true:

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-iframe-link-14558.html

What if there's an a href tag (can be seen through "inspect element") within the iframe embedded in a webpage?

[PhilNottingham]

That test in no-way proves that the link passed PageRank.

I'm not sure about an href within an iframe, but equally I don't see any reason why you would do that?