YouTube vs. LimeLight - What are the SEO pros and cons of each platform for on-site video viewing?

[JakeMatulewicz]

Are there any SEO benefits of hosting on-site videos using LimeLight?

I know the various benefits of using YouTube but before going forward with a site redesign I want to hear what others have to say.

Thanks,

Jake

[MichaelC-15022]

Hi Jake,

I'm not familiar with LimeLight, but Phil Nottingham did this great writeup on YouTube vs. hosting on other platforms.

One of the things you need to be concerned about is:  will Panda recognize the embedded video as rich content on the page?  iFramed solutions might not be....traditionally, Google has NOT treated iframed content as existing on the page (although I've seen a couple of examples with clients' sites where iframed-in content has caused the "wrapping" page to rank for content that's only in the iframed).

I'm a big fan of embedding using Wistia, using their video SEO embed type.  It automatically creates not only your video sitemap, but also embeds schema.org/VideoObject markup on the page, so that Google absolutely can tell that there's a video embedded there, and what it's about etc. as well.

Michael

[JakeMatulewicz]

This is a great response.  I appreciate it.

So in your opinion it sounds like you believe getting the "rich content" included on the page is more important than getting the additional view on your YouTube video.

I'm torn because when searching for video YouTube appears more often in the top positions over a site even if the site has the rich markup.

Thanks,

Jake

[MichaelC-15022]

Go over Phil's article carefully, especially the comparison bit at the end.  There are times when YouTube makes more sense, but mostly it's either big brand awareness stuff, or things people would start by going to YouTube to find, e.g. rock videos, TV show excerpts, some viral content, etc.