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Hi Jason,

my apologies - I didn't realise I'd already looked at the site and offered similar comments previously!

Yes, embedding the videos in the block of text should work fine - just make sure you don't duplicate this in lightbox though, as this may cause some confusion for Googlebot.

I'm afraid I can't quite remember what the site looked like last time, but I have to say I actually think the overall look, feel and structure is pretty decent. Good job! My main concern generally speaking would be with the site build and the back-end. It's currently very slow to load and things like the drop-down don't work very well on tablets/mobile devices. As mentioned, the videos are also delivered through a lightbox in a slightly strange way which isn't great for SEO.

Video wise - I do completely take your point about the value of the content even though it's not ideal, however, I would advise extreme caution if you're serious about trying to rank with rich snippets. It's not easy to "undo" getting a video rich snippet - and if the poor quality thumb actually lowers your CTR and therefore rankings, it'll obviously be pretty disastrous for you. So, I definitely recommend split testing this if you can before pushing ahead - using SERP Turkey as a tool to do this for you.

It is possible to get videos indexed in a lightbox, but it all depends whether or not Google succeed in understanding your execution.

As your implementation currently links to another page with the embedded video player on it, then pulls this page up in the lightbox - I'd confidently say that this won't work for you. From a crawler standpoint, the video lives on this page http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/videogallery/gallery/single/product_id/443/media_video_id/24/, not this page http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/twin-dvd-player/nextbase-sdv48ac/.

So, in order to make this work, you will need to find a different way of implementing your lightbox, ideally using just CSS or with simple JavaScript.

The one thing just to flag as a point of concern - the videos in the example are extremely low quality. If you are trying to get thumbnails of those videos displaying alongside your listings, I'd be concerned that you may actually drop traffic, rather than increase it.

I hope that's useful!

Thanks,
Phil.

You don't need to include them no, and You can't include a sitemap entry for a YouTube video page anyway, only individual pages on your own site.

You can choose to include embedded your YouTube videos in your video sitemap if you wish - (Tutorial for you here: https://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/) But this isn't the best strategy to take if you're trying to get rich snippets (see here: http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy)

I hope that's useful!

I use a 5D Mk III, three Arri 750 lights and Sennheiser MKE Lav mics for the DistilledLive videos - EXAMPLE

For talking head videos, I don't think there is a massive difference between using a good lav vs using a boom microphone - you can get great quality from both. Similarly, the difference between a DSLR and a good camcorder is relatively marginal as well for simple recordings. The things that really make a difference are firstly understand how to set up your lights, and secondly having some post production skills.

Lighting will be the major factor in determining the quality of your image and you need to find a way to effectively remove shadow while keeping a natural skin tone on your subject. Once you've mastered the lighting, you need to understand basic colour correction and grading - as well as how to mix and master audio tracks. For vocals, you want to cut quite heavily any superfluous frequencies at the top and bottom end that just pick up noise, as well as adding compression and a bit of reverb to bring some life to the sound.

It's hard to offer really concrete advice without a bit more information on the specific context in question, but here are some general pointers:

1. You probably shouldn't duplicate the content across YouTube channels. You can't Geotarget YouTube channels and in practice, this is not really any different from having duplicate content across multiple websites. If you do duplicate the content, you'll cannibalise the effectiveness of the videos ranking on both YouTube and Google organic searches, plus you'll split the view count which will harm your YouTube optimisation.
2. Absolutely 100% do not put the sales focused product videos on YouTube - as in doing so you'll drive traffic to YouTube instead of your own site, which means you're adding an unnecessary step in the conversion funnel which will probably cost you money. You cannot sell from a YouTube channel and external links on YouTube get extremely low click through rates, with very very few people going to YouTube to search for products to buy (you only go to YouTube to watch a video). There is a bit more information about this for you in these links: http://moz.com/blog/the-marketing-value-of-youtube , http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy, http://moz.com/videos/view/2013/building-a-winning-video-marketing-strategy
3. Annotated external links do not get clicked very often, I wouldn't rely on this as a strategy at all. It basically won't work.
4. You can't geotarget annotations, no.

So, in short - I probably recommend just having a single channel and only putting the entertaining videos on YouTube. bear in mind that YouTube doesn't drive much traffic, so your goal here should be brand awareness, not traffic acquisition.

I hope that's useful!

Thanks,

Phil

It really depends on the kind of content you have and where that will best serve user intent.

Ultimately, the intent on product pages and the intent on help pages is nuanced and slightly different. Is a "tutorial" video going to satisfy the user who lands on a category page, likely looking to potentially make refine a selection and make a purchase? Although I haven't seen your videos, so it's hard to say for sure - I'd guess it's probably not ideal. In such an instance, the user probably wants to know more about the features and benefits of a product/category type, rather than "how to use X".

Ideally you should re-edit and reframe the videos you have (or make new videos) to match the specific pages - so having one variation for the category page that fits the user intent there and then one for the help page section which better matches that user intent. My gut is to say that your current videos will work better in the help section, but I say this without knowledge of the site or videos, so please take that recommendation with a pinch of salt.

I don't recommend following EGOL's suggestion in this thread, because I think it's a slightly old hat "SEO' mentality that puts the search engine factors above the user experience. Just because you won't get penalised for having the same video across multiple pages doesn't mean it's a great idea.

Remember that video is just a media type, like text and image. You (probably) wouldn't think about duplicating blocks of text across multiple pages and for the same reasons, I don't think it's particularly wise to treat video any differently. Make sure you're creating content FOR the pages, rather than creating the content and then trying to work out where it fits afterwards.

While it's possible that a video you create is relevant for multiple use-cases, in 99% of circumstances, said video would better serve each use case by at least being slightly re-edited for each page that it lives on. If you think that actually, the video is perfectly relevant for each page in question and doesn't need to be re-edited, then you should probably ask yourself whether you need two pages or whether you can consolidate the content into two pages. It's much better (from both a search engine and user perspective) to have one very strong, rich page targeted at a specific topic, rather than to have multiple thinner pages.

I hope that's useful!

Phil

You're most welcome!

Videos using a lightbox will sometimes get indexed - it really depends on whether or not Google manage to execute the JS - and this really depends on the whole site architecture. It might be an issue for you, it might not.

My gut is that the main issue at this stage is just time, so I'd definitely give it a few more weeks before taking any further action.

From personal experience, I would be extremely surprised if the position of the video has anything to do with it - "the fold" is a much less concretely defined concept than it once was and your videos are perfectly prominent on the page.

Hi Michelle,

So - firstly, a week is not enough time to determine whether there is a problem with indexation. Videos can take weeks and even months to get indexed, even with all the appropriate mark-up applied, and so I'd recommended at least holding fire for a few more weeks before being too concerned.

However... there are quite a few things on the page in question which could confuse Googlebot and therefore pose problems for you. Firstly, you've embedded the same video twice on the page - once in a lightbox behind a JavaScript Trigger, and then once just embedded into the page. It's hard to know whether Google will be able to execute that JavaScript successfully, but it's highly possible this double embed could confuse Googlebot (and confuse users!). Is there any particular reason why you've embedded the video twice? Secondly, you've also embedded a load of YouTube videos at the bottom of the page. YouTube videos get indexed on the pages they're embedded on instantly, but don't often rank with rich snippets in the blended organic results. This is also a fairly confusing signal to Googlebot, where the "one video per page" model still seems to be the most effective way of getting everything indexed correctly.

I hope that's useful!

Phil

Are you able to share the site in question?

I'll happily take a look into it for you.

Are you looking to remove every single video snippet? Or just the snippets from some pages? It seems fairly drastic to remove every one, so I'd suggest you  delve a bit deeper and work out exactly which pages you don't want the snippet on any more. That way, you can submit a sitemap with some URLs, but not all.

Additionally, note that it's much easier to get the thumbnail changed than the snippet removed entirely, could you try split testing thumbnails to see if it's just suboptimal pictures that are causing you problems here, rather than the snippets as a whole?

If you can't take the videos down, I honestly think you'll struggle to get the snippets removed. Google are not on your side here unfortunately.

I don't think that, right now, It has a huge amount to do with G+. However, you can bet that the integration will be there at some point in the near future.

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!

So, there are a number of factors here.

The first thing to recognise is that related and recommended videos are highly personalised. What you see will be based on things you've seen before and videos that YouTube think may be of interest to you. So, if you've watched your competitors videos before, it's highly likely that you'll see more content from that channel again, or content targeting similar topics and keywords.

That said, there are a few other factors at play. YouTube seem to generally only recommend videos within the same broad category as the video you just watched (e.g. science and technology) and click through rate on recommended videos also seems to be a big factor in determining which ones continue to be offered vs those which are offered less.

So, to optimise for that, you should look at keyword targeting for the topics you want to be seen as "related" for, and then generally optimise the performance of the video by ensuring you have good audience retention (look through your YouTube analytics to understand how your performance shapes up) and that you're getting traffic and views through embeds/referring links.

I'd recommend having a good read through http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/youtube-seo/ which, despite being three years old, remains fairly accurate.

Not sure if you're speaking mostly about videos watched on YouTube.com or videos embedded on another site, but with videos you embed on your own sites, you can adjust the settings in the embed so that related videos do not show up. Just unselect the button that says "Show suggested videos when the video finishes" when you go to select your embed code.

Yes, it needs to be a .xml file.

You can save a text file as .xml using Word or Pages... or even notepad.

+1 RB.

RB is a boss.

1. As you say, If you're that concerned about privacy - then you shouldn't make the video available online. It's extremely difficult/nigh-on impossible to stop those who want to pirate something from pirating it; so if you're that bothered, my advice would be don't put the video online.

That said...

RTMP S3 will likely be more secure for you than Vimeo or Wistia, because anyone who researches the way those platforms structure their URLS and unique codes will probably be able to figure out a download link and pull out the content.

2. Wistia's analytics is WAY better, plus it can integrate with GA.

3. Wistia has a ton of tools, called "Labs" and the platform is much more flexible than vimeo in terms of the functionality and embed style. A lot of third party apps will work with both platforms, but it really depends what specifically you're looking to do.

For my money, Wistia is much better than Vimeo Pro across the board, with a much better toolset - but Vimeo Pro is extremely cheap. Ultimately, if you can afford Wistia, I'd go with that.

Yes - use Open site explorer.

Some details on how to do that in this guide: http://www.distilled.net/training/video-marketing-guide/#6

Hi team at Booj,

I've written quite a few things since that article which expand on the topic of video hosting and YouTube, which I recommend you have a look at. The most relevant one for you will be http://moz.com/blog/the-marketing-value-of-youtube which explains when YouTube is a valuable marketing channel.

You should also find this http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy useful and there's a video on this page http://www.distilled.net/consulting/video-seo/ which covers the topic in some detail.

Additionally, my presentation from MozCon this year covers the topic in depth, so I recommend having a look through those videos when they're available.

Thanks,

Phil

Just following up on this one. I've just gone through this process - http://youtubecreator.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/using-google-page-identity-on-youtube.html for Distilled, and It does work.

It's not perfectly elegant, but will do the job.