Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yep, build some links :).

Yes, there are lots of benefits.

Outside of the ones mentioned, you can get rich snippet results in the video SERPs (though this is rare) and you can also get "as seen on" attribution, which is a link at the bottom of a YouTube video that links to a curated page on youtube.com where it lists through a number of the YouTube videos featured on that site/blog, pulling in supporting text from the site. these curated pages provide a referring link back to the sites (through a 303 redirect). If you want to get this attribution, i would generally recommend only embedding one YT video on each page.

re="canonical"  - or noindex the video section, dependent on how similar the pages are. If they're different enough, a "noindex,follow" tag will be more appropriate.

I feel your pain. It's really irritating to see other sites getting some attribution for your work, but unfortunately we're dealing with relatively new functionality here and as such, it's not yet super sophisticated. Going forward, you may hopefully find that YT gets smarter at appropriating attribution to the content creators, but in the mean time - it has a choice between two relatively poor quality references and is simply picking one over the other.

I don't think it will have anything to do with your domain name, but you are currently not linking back to the original post on your site within the vid meta description. probably worth putting this in. It's only a nofollow link without anchor text, but still a relevant reference. You might also want to try linking back to your channel on the post with the embed code.

Another thing I would recommend trying is bringing in lots of views to the video on your own site. If two sites have embedded the content, but one is generating more views than the other, then these seems to me to be a relatively sensible metric for determining "as seen on" attribution. I haven't tested this to see if it's true, but It cant hurt to give it a go.

Don't put product videos on YouTube, Vimeo or anywhere public outside of your domain. Commercial content like that inevitably does poorly on YouTube and the negative user engagement metrics will then just suggest to Google that the content isn't high quality and it wont rank anywhere. Moreover, product videos are only really valuable if they're viewed in the context of the product - where users have a clear funnel for conversion.

I would securely host them with a third party platform and then aim to get rankings and rich snippets. While you can mark YouTube videos as "unlisted" in order to stop them being public, the content then won't rank.

Hi Ivo,

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think you're really going to struggle to get those snippets removed, especially since you've used YouTube embeds.

It seems that right now, once a video is indexed, it's very hard to get that snippet removed. You can get a difference video snippet indexed for the page, but Google don't seem to refresh the index regularly or re-crawl pages to determine whether the video attribution is still relevant that often either.

In instances where I have managed to get snippets removed, it's often taken months and there doesn't seem to be a huge level of consistency I can point to.

That said, here are my recommendations:

• Submit a new video sitemap with the appropriate pages taken out (don't just remove the old one)
• Take the videos off the page (and you probably want them off YouTube as well in your case).
• Ensure you don't have FB open graph tags or schema tags related to the video on the page.
• Once you've done all this, resubmit the page to GWMT and then hope for the best!

Hi Tamara,

Admittedly, I have not seen this before - but It seems to me that the numerical strings probably correspond to videos that don't have Titles - potentially either videos that have been deleted - or perhaps videos that just haven't had titles specified when being uploaded.

In short, it's a slight error in YouTube analytics, but the cause isn't entirely clear. As the URLs that the video codes should respond to bring up a 404 error, I'd suggest that perhaps these were old videos that have been deleted, though that it only a guess.

How can you remove it? To be honest, I'm not sure. I suggest you speak to YouTube support.

Hi Kyle,

So - I think you should ultimately let the content drive the decision here. You need to consider consider what audience the content will appeal to, where it will perform best and how the content works outside of the context of a supportive page.

Additionally, you need to look at the pages you want to embed the videos on and work out whether these are likely to generate rich snippets/improve rankings with securely hosted video content on Vimeo Pro/Wistia. Is that going to be the best use of the content vs the authoritative YT account they have built up.

My gut is to say that if they've built up a YT channel with 1.5K subscribers and they get up to 20K views per video - then they're clearly doing something well on YouTube and it would be a mistake to take down that content and undo all the good work. While YouTube doesn't necessarily drive traffic to your root domain or provide followed links - it is enormously valuable for branding, expanding an audience base and building out rich page types through embedded YT videos.  Additionally, You also need to check to see if anyone else has scraped the content and uploaded it to YouTube. If they have, there is no point taking it down.

if you split the embedded videos and the YT versions, hosting the embedded ones with a third party - then while you may be more likely to get rich snippets and links - you will prevent the YT videos from doing as well as they can by restricting the overall views to those which took place outside of your site and domain.

Embedded YouTube videos do sometimes provide rich snippets back to the referring domains, especially if you apply schema mark-up, so i'd probably recommend doing that with the historical content and then making a judgement call re future creations dependent on the kind of content it is and what the wider marketing aims of the company are.

Concerning Analytics - the YT analytics are actually pretty good. Hotspots particularly gives you a clear indicator of how the content is performing, so I wouldn't want to suggest switching to a third party for that reason.

Hope that helps! Unfortunately it's hard to make a specific recommendation without knowledge of the company and the content. Video SEO absolutely has to be content driven and I'd hate to recommend something that disintegrated the wider marketing plans.

Cheers,

Phil

I'm assuming this is a hypothetical question, but if not, I would be interested to know how you managed to get 100 pages heavily shared around the same marketing campaign!

It's difficult to make a conclusive judgement on this without knowing how you intend/how you have built all the links and social shares across 100 new pages on your site, but i'd think your main risk of penalisation is in redirecting a large number of pages all to the same location simultaneously, rather than in redirecting to something unrelated. I think you're unlikely to incur a major penalty doing this, but more of a risk will be that it might not do you any good.

If you are auto-generating all of your social responses, this is going to be relatively clear to Google; as those social profiles will likely be lacking in the "real human" signals, which are relatively easy to pick out, and may therefore be discounted anyway. Plus, there isn't (as far as i am aware) any decent study which shows how Google treat social shares following a redirect once the sharing has died out.

While a redirect may pass some link juice for you to the specific pages you want ranking, I can't quite understand the advantage of doing this rather than leaving the high value pages in place to build domain strength and continue to accrue social signals. You could instead put a few internal links on your high value pages to point at the targets you want to rank.

Hi Steven,

So - I'm seeing 244 videos indexed for your site and definitely way more than 33 images. (just do a site: search in Google to get some more accurate data about indexation). In this instance, i'd be inclined to suggest that webmaster tools is just not giving you an accurate picture (this is not uncommon) and it will probably fix itself in due course.

One thing to flag, for videos especially, is that it can take a while (weeks) for Google to index the content. I recommend holding out for a month or so more and seeing how things change. If the indexed number starts to increase in Google, irrespective of what webmaster tools says.. then it's fine.

Hi Lucas,

A couple of months ago i wrote a pretty extensive blog post on this topic. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo I would suggest you have a read through that and see if that helps you to decide the best course of action.

The essence of the answer is - it depends what you want to achieve and what sort of content you are creating. To get your video appearing in the SERP - with a referring link back to your site, you will be better off self hosting, as YouTube will often outrank your site for it's own video otherwise.

Cool.

To be honest, it really doesn't matter a great deal. i would be inclined to go down the subdomain route - just because it makes it easier if you want to shift things up and move them to another domain later on, but that's entirely personal preference.

Often video files are hosted on totally different domains, such as when you're using a 3rd party player and hosting solution and it doesn't seem to make any difference with regards to getting good video results.

Your player_loc tag as an example.com link in it and the file you're pointing to in your content_loc tag is a .swf file, which means that should be a player_loc tag instead.

Other than that, it looks fine.

There are actually very few Ecommerce companies doing video right in terms of SEO - including My Binding, who get outranked by YouTube for most of their videos. It's worth noting that putting product videos on a YouTube channel is invariably a bad strategy, so I'd look outside of channels and search for some good sites with securely hosted videos on them, rather than YouTube embed.

However, in terms of content, i'd recommend looking at www.appliancesonline.co.uk who I think do superb product videos and have superb product pages all-round actually.

Aeronet offers some great suggestions, i just have a couple of additional resources to recommend:

if you're uploading to YouTube, Caption Tube is a nice service which makes it quick to create a closed caption file. Also, if you host with Wistia, they will create the files for you at a (pretty reasonable) price of $5 per minute of video.

For general transcriptions through audio, video and all express scribe is a great bit of software - though make sure you also get the foot pedal!

Well - your sitemap is fine, except your content_loc and player_loc tags are wrong.

You should replace the file which you reference in the content_loc tag with the current file being referenced in the player_loc tag (which is just an example.com link, which means I assume you used a tool to construct the sitemap). You should then cut the content_loc tag as you don't need it for this specific sitemap.

Hey Ryan,

I'm afraid there's no way you're going to get a rich snippet for that page on that site - certainly not without a video sitemap. For a video to be indexed on Mark-up alone (and even with a sitemap to some extent) the site does need to be relatively strong and the page clearly quite relevant. Unfortunately, this means testing on a WP blog like that won't be good enough.

If you have a stronger, bigger site you can play with - then i's recommend creating a random page on that and giving it a go.

Cheers,

Phil.

Hi Miguel,

Essentially it depends what you are trying to achieve. If you're trying to get Google to crawl your videos and offer you a video result in the organic SERPs, then you should self-host the videos, or use a third party hosting company such as Vimeo Pro or Wistia. Youtube is great for seeding your content to a wider audience and there's nothing wrong with embedding YouTube videos on your site if you can provide valuable supporting content. YouTube videos also typically rank well in the SERPs - but obviously this wont help the SEO of your main site.

What sort of content do you have? - Hopefully i can help to offer some more specific advice.

Thanks,

Phil

It'll take several weeks and up to a couple of months for Google to crawl your video sitemap. Once you've fixed it, as recommended, you'll need to sit tight and wait for the crawl.

For a strong site (SEOmoz sort of size) you're looking at a week or two.

For weaker sites, it could be a anything up to a few months.