Is your video content getting indexed?

by Mike Badgley on July 9, 2010

Read an interesting article the other day called Video SEO: A technical guide (by Joost de Valk) which goes into a in-depth explanation of video SEO. It is something that I had not really thought about previously – had really just been concentrating on getting individual pages to be indexed by leading search engines like Bing or Google. However, if your site makes use of video content, it is really in your best interest to ensure that it is indexed (viewable).

In Joost’s article, he mentions four methods of getting your video content indexed. The method I ended up choosing was an XML video sitemap. I originally tried the RDFa method, but the WordPress blog platform I’m on kept stripping out all the meta data that was inserted into the <object> tag of the embedded video. This actually was the method I preferred, but I couldn’t find a way to get it to work with the WordPress editor.

To test this out, I used an annoucement video that my employer (High Road Communications) released back in January of this year.

I created an XML file, based on the documentation found on Google’s webmasters site and than submitted it as a sitemap within Webmaster Tools. The XML file that I created looked like the following:

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
	<url>
	  <loc>http://www.lifeathighroad.com/web-development/can-google-see-your-video/</loc>
	  <video:video>
	    <video:title>High Road Announcement Video</video:title>
	    <video:publication_date>
	      2010-01-19
	    </video:publication_date>
	    <video:content_loc>



	    </video:content_loc>
	    <video:thumbnail_loc>

http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/lVT2Q1g02X0/default.jpg

	    </video:thumbnail_loc>
	    <video:description>
		By pushing past the boundaries of conventional public relations with new ideas and original thinking well connect you with the media and influencers that matter. Its all about your brand. Map your companys future with High Road and go forward.
	    </video:description>
	    <video:tag>High Road Communications</video:tag>
	    <video:tag>iStudio</video:tag>
	    <video:tag>annoucement</video:tag>
	    <video:duration>68</video:duration>
	  </video:video>
	</url>
</urlset>

You can get a description of all the various tags by viewing the documentation here on the webmaster’s site referenced above.

Update: RDFa now working

I was able to find a way of getting that RDFa method to work using a nifty plugin called EmbedIt. I’ve updated the <object> tag of my video so that it now has the required RDFa markup, as documented on SearchMonkey:

<object
	classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000"
	width="640"
	height="385"
	codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"
	rel="media:video"
	resource="http://www.youtube.com/v/lVT2Q1g02X0"
	xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/media/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">

		<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" />
		<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" />
		<param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/lVT2Q1g02X0&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1?rel=0&amp;hd=1" />
		<param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" />
		<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640" height="385" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/lVT2Q1g02X0&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1?rel=0&amp;hd=1" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed>

		<a rel="media:thumbnail" href="http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/lVT2Q1g02X0/default.jpg" />

		<span property="dc:date" content="2010-01-19" />
		<span property="dc:description" content="By pushing past the boundaries of conventional public relations with new ideas and original thinking well connect you with the media and influencers that matter. Its all about your brand. Map your companys future with High Road and go forward." />

		<span property="media:title" content="High Road Announcement Video" />
		<span property="media:duration" content="68" />
		<span property="media:width" content="640" />
		<span property="media:height" content="385" />

</object>

I’m really curious to see the effect implementing these two methods will have in terms of visibility of the video. Will keep you posted!