Are iframes really an organic search problem?

[94501]

I'm helping someone with a new site that will have pages for organic search that contain embedded video.

Some will be youtube embeds and some will be wistia embeds. These pages will have several hundred words of transcript text and the embeds (iframes) iframes themselves will be rather small, but expandable and possibly more than one per page.

The transcript text area is more like 80% of the page.

Do you think this is an organic search problem? I use one site audit tool that calls this out as a serious warning.

Currently, the embedded player(s) are a column down the left side, about 1/4th of the width of the page,  and the transcripts are everything else, wrapping around it.  The transcripts are fully readable and not hidden in some kind of expandable accordion or anything. Does layout matter in this issue?

Thanks... Darcy

[evolvingSEO]

Hi There

Just to clarify, only the YouTube or Wistia video embeds will be in iFrames? The text will just be normal text on the page (check out a Moz Whiteboard Friday video for example - the transcription is actual text in the page)?

This is pretty normal - everyone uses YouTube and Wistia with the standard embed codes.

You can use Video Sitemaps to give search engines more info about the videos on your site. You can also use schema for videos. But even if you don't, if it's just normal video embeds this would be fine.

[94501]

Yes, the only iframe is the wistia and youtube embedded player.

Yes, it seems funny that this site audit tool calls out an embedded player as a problem. What if it was a Vimeo player... does that make any difference. I think probably not

Thanks!

[evolvingSEO]

That's right, pretty sure Vimeo works the same way