Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced
To the fabulous, savvy audience that attended our Video Sitemap webinar several months ago, please accept our re-gift: a summary of your questions from the Video Sitemaps Q&A!
To those who were unable to attend the webinar, please enjoy our gift of the summarized Q&A — it’s like new!
Either way, happy holidays from all of us on the Webmaster Central Team. 🙂
Yes, you can use a third party to host videos. Only the play page–the URL within the tag–needs to be on your site. and can list URLs on a different site or subdomain.
For example, here’s a snippet from a valid Video Sitemap that shows content hosted on a different subdomain from the play page:
http://www.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html
Currently, there doesn’t exist functionality that allows you, as the uploader, to verify that you’re the owner of a video. The issue of authorship is a hard problem on the web, not just for videos, but nearly all types of content.
Google treats YouTube as just another source for video content — though you don’t need to submit a Video Sitemap if you only want your YouTube-hosted videos indexed. If, however, you’re using YouTube as a online video platform (i.e., with play pages on your own site), then we do recommend Sitemap submission.
Video Sitemap submission is a two-part process:
Currently, the most important metadata to include is title and description — both are required. The category tag is optional, and there isn’t a list from which to select.
None of the Video Search principles change with HTML5. We still recommend using a Video Sitemap regardless of the markup on your site. HTML5 can be helpful, though, because tags like
We do not recommend using iframes to embed video content on your pages.
You can. We’ve found, however, that users may not consider it the best experience. When users click on a video search result, they most often don’t like being forced to locate the correct video among multiple videos on the resulting page.
Just make sure that Googlebot isn’t blocked.
We try to use the thumbnail you provide if it’s valid. If not, we’ll try to generate a thumbnail ourselves. We recommend that you provide thumbnails that are at least 120×90 pixels. We also accept many thumbnail formats, such as PNG and JPEG.
At this time, there aren’t video filesize limitations on content submitted through VIdeo Sitemaps.
Currently there isn’t, but perhaps down the road.
Depends on the use case and how it’s rendered, but if indexing by search engines is important to you, it’s not the safest method. In the Webmaster Help Center, we explain that “When designing your site, it’s important to configure your video pages without any overly complex JavaScript or Flash setup.” Most often, for bots, simpler is safer.
Have a safe and happy holiday!