Duplicate video content question

[ShawnHerrick]

This is really two questions in one.

1. If we put a video on YouTube and on our site via Wistia, how would that affect our rankings/authority/credibility? Would we get punished for duplicate video content?

2. If we put a Wistia hosted video on our website twice, on two different pages, we would get hit for having duplicate content?

Any other suggestions regarding hosting on Wistia and YouTube versus just Wistia for product videos would be much appreciated. Thank you!

[TommyTan]

Hi Shawn,

1. If we put a video on YouTube and on our site via Wistia, how would that affect our rankings/authority/credibility? Would we get punished for duplicate video content?<<<<

I am wondering why don't you put your video on YouTube and then embed the YouTube video on your website.  Won't that be better in terms of getting more traffic to your video on YouTube?  Since YouTube is the 2nd largest Search Engine, I would rather upload videos there and optimize it for search on YouTube and Google.  By embedding your video from YouTube, you can 1) get more views on the video, 2) increase traffic to the video and 3) increase video exposure to those who don't view videos on YouTube but visited your website

2. If we put a Wistia hosted video on our website twice, on two different pages, we would get hit for having duplicate content?<<<

I don't think I have enough knowledge in this but I believe that Search Engines can't crawl videos.  I believe they use Title's, Tags, Descriptions and any sort of text. to determine a videos ranking.  Based on what you did, I don't think that will cause duplicate content since Matt Cutts usually upload videos on YouTube and a bunch of people shares it on their website and they don't get punished for it.  In conclusion, I don't think using same video will cause duplicate content as long as the text are different.

Hope this helps.

[PhilNottingham]

1. You won't get punished for duplicate content, but it's still probably not a very good idea  (read here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy for a detailed explanation)

2. No.

More details on the topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

http://www.distilled.net/training/video-marketing-guide/

http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/

[ShawnHerrick]

Thank you SEO Moz! We are trying a Wistia hosting test for the next few months. Thanks for suggesting that and for all the great advice.