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Hi Julie,

I would sincerely advise against that approach for product videos. See my recent post on the topic. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

Self-hosting will have nothing to do with Google's choice of position for the ranking.

So, I think it's entirely feasible that Google have chosen to rank you lower in the page, but with a video rich snippet - but it may not be the case at all, you may have just lost rankings due to an algorithm update.

Video results are often given position 3 in the SERPs, but i've seen them appear elsewhere too. If there are a number of video results for a term which suggests a video result would be the best return i.e: "Tutorial", then these results can rank in the top positions.

However, the question i would be interested to hear the answer to is "Have you lost traffic?". Video rich snippets in position three often have a higher click through rate than the top result. If you've got lots of nice rich snippets (albeit with lower ranking), but are maintaining or growing your traffic - then clearly you're in a better position than you were before.

Google may also choose to not rank video results if it feels like videos are not appropriate for the search query. It's not always consistent with this, which is why you may have got some of your products getting the rich snippets, but not others.

What wont happen is that you receive a main listing and a second video snippet result for the same page. Video results are basically page results, but with extra metadata to indicate that there is a video on the page.

If this has caused you to lose traffic, then you could try putting the videos on a different page (with supporting text and content) for each product - and optimise those pages for longer tail keywords around your product, while letting the main product page rank for the head term. I wouldn't really recommend that though, as it will spread your link equity thinner and seems somewhat superfluous.

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.

Here's the post i've just published on the topic - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

Please have a read through, as it will add a bit more clarity to the benefits of each option. Your summary is great Kane.

Hi Guys,

I'm actually writing a post on this very topic at the moment, which is due to be posted tomorrow on the main SEOmoz blog post. Hopefully that will answer most of the questions you have and we can continue the discussion in the comments if you have any further queries or points.

Cheers,

Phil

Hi Brett,

As far as i am aware, Google has not rolled out this functionality yet, as the instant preview is just a cached image snapshot from the page itself, it's not an actual HTML feed or iframe.

I can imagine the ability to preview vids (especially youtube videos) coming along within the next year or so, but for now you can't watch them without clicking through.

Hi Brett,

I'm afraid i haven't yet found a program that scales sitemap creation effectively or accurately. If you're hosting with Wistia, then they have a great app which does it automatically for you. Alternatively, it should be easy to put one together with Google's guide: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472

Or i have built a basic template here: http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/getting-video-results-in-google/

Hey,

So I wouldn't worry too much about the consequence of videos on page speed. The only instance it's going to cause problems is if you embed a large quality of flash content on a single page.

Youtube videos wont cause much issue at all because they are typically embedded using an iframe.

I wouldn't worry about filling pages with rich media too much, it's a good thing to do and wont cause load speed issues unless you have tons of enormous images and hundreds of videos on each page. Use HTML5 players or iframes rather than flash for video and ensure that your code is lean and not pulling in unnecessary files from the server. The most common contributor to page loading times is poor code, particularly badly written javascript.

Cheers,

Phil

I would recommend using either Vimeo Pro or Wistia. Both are excellent out of the box solutions that work for link building.

Of these, Vimeo pro is the cheapest, but Wistia is probably better. With wistia's  "superembeds" embed code generator, it allows you to quickly build out your video player style to include social buttons and embed boxes which will help to encourage people to share the content, while ensuring everything is secure and indexable by Google.

Hi Donald,

As others have mentioned, it's normally very difficult to get a rich snippet result off the back of an embedded YouTube video, which means your best bet will probably be to take the vids down from YouTube and host them yourself or with a third party provider.

I created a guide last week which gives you step by step instructions for getting your own domain ranking for a video - if you follow those pointers then you should have no problem getting the rich snippets in the SERPs.

Any questions/confusions, please do let me know.

Cheers,

Phil

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.

Hey,

As you correctly indentify - since a standard YouTube embed is in an iFrame, the content loads separately and wont effect site speed. If you choose to use an older style flash based YouTube embed, then this will require a bit of loading, but it wont be significant or anything to be concerned with. However, if you were to have a single page with tons of flash embeds, then this could be slightly problematic - so avoid that and use iFrames where possible.

Phil