Video SEO: Youtube, Vimeo PRO, Wistia, Longtail BOTR Experience and questions

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Obviously Video SEO is changing, Google is figuring out how to do it themselves. We are left wondering… Below we have tried to explain what we have learned and how the different sites work and their characteristics (links to graphics provided)

Our problem is: We are not getting congruent Google site:apalytics.tv Video filter results. We are wondering how duplicate content may be affecting our results… and if so, why will Youtube not be duplicate and prevent your own site SEO efforts from working.  Is Youtube special?  Does that include Vimeo too? We see our own duplicate videos on multiple sites in Google results, so it seems it is not duplicate related…?

We’d appreciate your experience or add to our questions and work as a community to get this figured out more definitively.  Thanks!

We’ve tried four video hosting solutions at quite a cost monetarily and in time.

1.)    Youtube, which gets all the SEO Juice and gets our clients on to other subjects or potentially competitive content.  Iframes just don’t get the results we are looking for.

2.)   See Vimeo Image: Vimeo PRO, a $200 year plus solution that allows us to do many video carousels on our own domains hosted on Vimeo, but are very limited in HTML as only CSS content changes are allowed.  While we were using Vimeo we allowed the Vimeo.com community to SEO our content directly and they come up often in search results. Due to duplicate content concerns we have disallowed Vimeo.com from using our content and SEOing our content to their domain. However, we have many “portfolios” (micro limited carousal sites on our domains) that continue to carry the content.  The Vimeo hosted micro site shows only three videos on Google:  site:apalytics.tv  During our testing we are concerned that duplicate content is causing issues too, so we are getting ready to shut off the many microsite domains hosted at Vimeo. (Vimeo has an old embed code that allows a NON-iframe embed – but has discontinued it recently)  That makes it difficult if not impossible to retain SEO juice for anything other than their simple micro sites that are very limited!

3.)  See Wistia Image:  Wistia, a $2000 year plus solution that only provides private video site hosting embedding various types of video content on one’s site/s.  Wistia has a free account now for three videos and limited plays – it’s a nice interface for SEO but is still different than BOTR.  We opted for BOTR because of many other advertising related options, but are again trying Wistia with the free version to see if we can figure out why our BOTR videos are not showing up as hoped.  We know that Google does not promise to index and feature every video on a sitemap, but why some are there and others are not and when remains a mystery that we are hoping to get some answers about.

4.)   See Longtail Image: Longtail, Bits On The Run, (JW Player author) a $1,000 year plus like Wistia provides private hosting, but it allows a one button YouTube upload for the same SEO meta data and content – isn’t that duplicate content? BOTR creates and submits video sitemaps for your content, but it has not been working for us and it has been impossible to get a definitive answer as I think they too are learning or are not wanting the expose their proprietary methods (which are not yet working for us!)

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