Google Video Sitemaps Best Practices Webinar Slides

Make Your Videos Discoverable
Google Video Sitemaps Best Practices

September 29th, 2010

Audio Access:
United States: 1 516 453 0014
Canada: 1 778-783-0791
United Kingdom: 44 (0) 203 318 6075
Access Code: 543-274-227

Today's agenda

• Mark Robertson
o Introductions
o Overview

• Amy MacIsaac
o Specifications

• Nelson Lee
o Best practices

• Q&A
o Submit your questions via chat

Nelson Lee
Product Manager, Google Video Search Products

• Nelson Lee is a Product Manager on Video Search, which is
Google‟s index and corpus of videos on the Web.

• Prior to working at Google, Nelson finished his PhD in
Computer Science at Stanford University.

• Throughout his time at Stanford, he has interned as a
software engineer and researcher at numerous tech
companies including HP Labs, Microsoft Research and Apple
Computer, Inc.

• He is a Beatles fanatic and knows just about every harmony
part to every Beatles song.

Amy MacIsaac
Strategic Partner Manager, Google‟s Content Partnerships Team

• Amy has worked for Google for 6 1/2 years.

• During her tenure at Google Amy has spent much of her time
in the AdWords Sales and Operations organization managing
revenue programs and segmentation projects.

• Part of the launch teams for Google‟s Traditional Media
initiatives.

• Spent almost 20 years working in traditional & online media.

• Prior to Google Amy spent much many years at Ziff Davis
Publishing, Lycos, Inc and Looksmart, Inc., in sales and
marketing roles.

• She has a B.A. in Business Administration from Northeastern
University.

Video search for video discovery
Users Use Search To Find Video
• 38% of all US online users report using search engines‟ results to discover
video1

• 54% of online users reported using YouTube‟s search to discover video1
• Dec 2008 – YouTube becomes 2nd largest search engine in US2

Search Engines Drive Video Referral Traffic
• Search generates the highest volume of traffic to web video content3
• 40.1% from Google
• 16.8% from Yahoo
• 13.1% from Bing
• 2.7% from AOL

Sources: 1JupiterResearch/NPD Group Individual User Survey (6/2008) | 2 Comscore Search Rankings (6/2009) | 3Tubemogul (9/2010)

Importance of Google Videos
Videos Dominate Universal Search

• 38% of users who searched
Google were served video in
Universal search engine results
pages („08)

Source – “Google Universal Search Results Searcher
Penetration by Result Type” – ComScore – Jan 2008

Importance of Google Videos

• A large audience for your videos
• Supplies video content to Google's video and web search

Why create a Sitemap or mRSS

• Provides key video information to Google
• Optional meta tags describe your video content
• Improves crawling and indexing chances

Help Google index your videos....

..create a Video Sitemap or mRSS feed

Step by step

1. Create a Video Sitemap or mRSS feed

2. Submit via Webmaster Console

3. Googlebot crawls to verify video exists

4. Video is then eligible to be indexed in Google Videos

Video Sitemaps/mRSS 101

Required elements at a glance:
Elements Sitemap/mRSS
Title Required
Description Required
Play Page Required
Thumbnail Required
Player or Content Loc Required

Duration Highly Recommended
Expiration Highly Recommended
Regional Restrict (if relevant) Highly Recommended

Help Articles: Creating a Video Sitemap or Using mRSS feed as a Sitemap

Best practices

1. Public Access:

Sitemaps/mRSS must be saved at a publicly accessible URL. Google
cannot retrieve files from URLs that are protected by authentication
(even basic HTTP authentication).

The feed and the URLs pointed to by the feed must have their robots.txt
file set for User-agent "Googlebot".


Best practices

2. Location of video is unknown:

At least one of <video:player_loc> and <video:content_loc> is
required (both are suggested)


Best practices

3. Rejected for unsupported formats. (ie: QVT)

Supported <video:content_loc> formats include .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4,
.m4v, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv.

• Note if <video:player_loc> is specified then unsupported formats
is not an issue


Best practices

4. Missing XML Tag:

Required tags cannot be omitted such as: <loc>, <video:title>,
<video:description>, <video:thumbnail> and either <video:player_loc>
or <video:content_loc>

Any missing tag will prevent the video from getting indexed.


Best practices

5. Empty Tag values:

None of the tags included should be left empty. If information for a
particular tag is not available, do not list that tag in the sitemap.


Best practices

6. Duplicate URLs in the <loc> Fields:

This error says that a URL is duplicated and is repeated under
various location tags.

Specifically the <loc> tag, <video:player_loc> tag and the
<video:content_loc> tag should not be the same or it will report an
error and prevent us from processing.


Best practices

7. Invalid Tag Values:

Any value listed under a tag has to be in an acceptable format as
per the spec.

ie: expiration date: Acceptable formats are (YYYY-MM-DD) or
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss+TZD)


Best practices

8. Provide expiration date or return a soft 404:


Resources

@ Google
o Learn more: Google.com/videositemaps
o Stay informed: Official Webmaster Central Blog
o Start implementing: Read our Help Center articles
o Have questions? Post in our Help Forum

@ ReelSEO
o Video SEO Guide: ReelSEO.com/seo-for-video/
o Video Marketing News: ReelSEO.com/video/marketing
o Video SEO News: ReelSEO.com/video/seo/

Thank You – Please Visit:

http://www.ReelSEO.com/

http://video.Google.com/

- Stay tuned for news about our next webinar

Google Video Sitemaps Best Practices Webinar Slides

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Viewers also liked

Viewers also liked (10)

More from Mark Robertson ⏩

More from Mark Robertson ⏩ (9)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Google Video Sitemaps Best Practices Webinar Slides