Use of iFrames to embed video content?

[Liam-Web]

So we decided to add interesting video content we have shot ourselves to improve the user experience on our website. We have read though all the SEO material and advice we could find and decided to use Vimeo to host our videos instead of self-hosting. The videos themselves will not show up on Vimeo or Google as we set our account to 'private', but we notice that to embed the videos on our website - the embed code is an iFrame.

My question's are, aren't iFrames supposed to be bad for SEO? Should we look to another video hosting solution instead? If other websites embed our videos on their site using the iFrame, do we get any SEO credit or the backlink?

Thx.

[Kara.Wallace]

I would check out Wistia - "SEO embeds use old object tags so they're crawlable by those creepy search engine robots that make you Internet famous. SEO is inconsistent with IFrames; Google's official stance is that they don't crawl IFrames, although sometimes things like an image still or link might sneak their way in. These also use noscript tags to make sure transcripts are visible to everyone. However, they lack the universal compatibility of IFrames."

And they just added backlinks if someone embeds your video too.

Hope this helps.

Mike

[BD69]

I think iframes are the way to go for most sites, anything else is a pretty big hassle.

[PhilNottingham]

It used to be the case that iframe embeds often wouldn't get videos indexed, but provident you submit a sitemap correctly, it's now possible to do so (though not as surefire as flash or html5 embeds).

So, If you're dead set on using Vimeo (It's not the best option out there if you're trying to get videos ranking), then I'd recommend starting with an iframe embed, submitting your sitemap, then potentially using the flash "old" embed option if you fail to get the video indexed within a few months.

More details on how to do that here: http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/

[Liam-Web]

Thanks for all the helpful advice.

We are using Vimeo Plus set to 'private' as a way to keep our costs down. We did look at Wistia and really liked their hosting service and functionality, but it's just too expensive right now.