Video XML Sitemap

[MargaritaS]

I've been recently been information by our dev team that we are not allowed legally to make our raw video files available in a video XML sitemap...This is one of the required tags. Has anyone run into a similar situation and has figured out a way around it?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Margarita

[irvingw]

What do they mean legally? Maybe they mean technically can't generate them, or they are over the 50mrg limit or something like that according to Google's rules?

[MargaritaS]

nope, those raw files exist. They don't want to share them with the public. Legally is the only answer I got...I think it has to do in part with them being afraid of people trying to download the videos.

[benjaminspak]

" raw video files" as in pre- rendered?

• Illegal? No
• Impractical? Yes

Sounds like your dev team is lazy. Tell them to convert to videos to .mp4 and go from there.

[PhilNottingham]

Hi Margarita,

So - firstly, I can't quite understand the logic behind your Dev teams concerns here - as anyone knowledgable enough to find your video sitemap and pull the file URL from there will also be knowledgeable enough to look through your source code and rip the video file through the embedded player. If somebody really wants to download your content, they will - and a video sitemap listing the URLs of the mp4/mov files isn't going to be advertisment for people to do this.

If, in another attempt to prevent piracy, the dev teams are delivering the video content dynamically via JS - you're going to face another issue as the videos may not get indexed.

However, all that said... there is a way round this which may pacify your dev teams and still get the rich snippet results you're after  - and that is including a video:player_locelement in the sitemap, rather than a video:content_locelement. video:player_locshould point to a specific embedded player for a specific video -e.g. an .swf flash file or a dynamic HTML5 player e.g. http://player.vimeo.com/video/36862925.</video:player_loc></video:content_loc></video:player_loc>

This will prevent users from finding the original video files outside the context of the embedded player, but i should add that it's not an effective block against piracy.

I hope that's useful, let me know if you have any more questions.

Cheers,

Phil.

[PhilNottingham]

I don't think Margarita means the "unrendered" files, but rather the video files used within the embedded player - which will be .mp4 or .flv or .mov etc. References to these files are required  as part of a video sitemap as a video:content_locelement. </video:content_loc>

[MargaritaS]

Thank you so much, Phil. That's correct, the files are already in .mp4 format. Your answer below is perfect. I provided examples of big publishers who have no problem sharing their video locations. We will see how it goes! Just another battle as an in-house SEO. Thanks again!

-Margarita

[MargaritaS]

This is exactly what I needed! Thank you!!!!