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Hi,

The video being too far down the page might be an issue. I've seen this cause problems before, and in your case I think it could be a problem. More broadly though, I don't think you should have those videos on the category pages, because the video itself is just image slideshow and actually does more to hamper the using experience rather than help it. As rich snippets aren't common any more, I don't think you're going to get much value from having these videos on those pages.

Having the sitemap hosted at Wistia isn't a problem. You can point to a sitemap hosted on any site.

Other likely problems are duplicate content. You seem to have significant duplicate content issues as I'm seeing about 3 variations of that page indexed.

Hope that's useful,

Phil.

I'm still not 100% sure I understand the situation, but yes you should be able to add a noindex tag to this page I imagine. If you ant Google to find the videos linked out to from this page, use the noindex,follow tag rather than noindex,nofollow

Hi Riccardo,

This seems quite a complicated situation - are you able to provide links to the pages specifically? And also, just so I understand, are the video thumbs themselves pointing to separate pages with the videos on - and, in such a case, are you primarily concerned about insuring those video pages get indexed?

If so, this should be achievable. All you'll need to do is an a  rel="canonical" tag on the video thumbs page pointing to the main version.

First things first - does the video deserve to rank for this chaps name?

If the content isn't getting watched and it's not a good reflection of the company, tweaking the meta information will only get you so far. Before you begin, it has to be a good video. Second, it's in no way guaranteed that Google will show any videos for the query of his name anyway. A search term has to pass Google's "query deserves video" test before something is likely to be shown - and while you can force this a bit by having a very popular video clearly relevant to the search term, you won't get anywhere unless the video is good.

Additionally, 2 weeks is far too short a period of time to be testing this. Your client will need to be patient and wait a couple of months.

In short - It's probably worth proactively disavowing those links since it's a quick and easy task, but the possibility of them actually causing you any harm is ultimately very small.

I wouldn't worry about asking the webmasters to remove the links unless you're under manual penality, as this won't be a particularly good use of time.

That test in no-way proves that the link passed PageRank.

I'm not sure about an href within an iframe, but equally I don't see any reason why you would do that?

Nope, they can't. Those links are within the iframe.

If you're trying to get link equity from embedded video, it'll need to be with crediting text links or images outside of the actual player, as overlays are done with JavaScript, which doesn't pass PageRank by all accounts.

Not quite sure I understand... Are you trying to build links to the YouTube video on youtube.com? if so, an embed through an iframe does sort of count as a "link" to the video (i.e. it provides ranking equity), but only in the unique case of YouTube videos.

Or are you wondering if links in the descriptions/overlays will pass PageRank?

I wrote that post, and it's now nearly three years out of date.

They have got better at crawling iframes since then, and now you can get a video indexed if it's embedded in an iframe.

However, I don't think this relates to the question specifically?

Google see iframes as basically "a window into other sites". As such, no, they don't crawl links in this way - however, they will likely then crawl the page which the iframe references, and thereby pick up any backlinks there.

I'm not quite sure how this might related to an embedded YouTube video, but YouTube videos are indexed instantly anyway once they're published because Google don't need to crawl YouTube (they have access to the database)

Vimeo offer a great service, but be aware that the original focus of vimeo was a creative content, rather than a commercial service and so they don't allow you to upload anything blatantly commercial or marketing focussed unless you pay for the pro package, which is a relatively inexpensive $199 per year. If you have something nicely designed and artistic though (even if it is a bit commercial in nature), you may get away with it.

I wouldn't be so down on YouTube because of the ads. Its very easy to embed YouTube videos on your site, the content is mobile friendly and you can choose whether or not to allow adverts on any of your videos. Plus, YouTube gets indexed very quickly and you can optimise your content for search within the platform to achieve greater overall exposure. YouTube also has very smart variable bit-rate progressive encoding, so the service is excellent if you have very high-definition content but want people to be able to watch it without spending any time buffering on low bandwidth connections. The main downside to YouTube is it's security and that ads for other videos will come up in the embedded player on your site after your video has finished playing.

If you want to maintain a fully branded and corporate feel or secure you video from privacy, services like Wistia, Brightcove and Vzaar are all very good and simple to use, though will charge you for hosting based on bandwidth use. Wistia is particularly good because it submits sitemaps on your behalf which can aid you in getting blended results for your videos.

Alternatively, if you have the time and resources, then you could build your own HTML5 player and host the content on your own servers or through a cloud system like Amazon Web Services. There are some plugins and free apps which claim to assist with this, but i haven't tried any of them out.

The question which will ultimately define the answer to your initial query is "What am I trying to achieve with this video?" If you just want pure exposure, then i would host it on YouTube, embed the content on your site, submit a sitemap and optimise both the YouTube page and the page on your site for the same target keyword. If you want something to simply enrich your own website, but lock down the content to ensure any video views happen on your own site (which is what you want to do if your focus is link-building and referrals) then i would pay out the money for a service like Brightcove or Wistia.

So... yes, this is basically just a classic YouTube spam attack at reasonable scale. Nothing terribly sophisticated as far as I can ascertain (though I'm not going to out the tactics I see used publicly here).

It's  fairly common knowledge that the YouTube algorithm is much easier to spam than the Google algorithm (in some ways, it's like Google from 5 years ago) and sadly, this seems to cross over a bit into Google organic so that you can effectively get YouTube videos rankings for very competitive terms by virtue of the fact that Google often ranks YouTube pages/videos very highly, yet YouTube is seemingly not subject to quite the same spam detection or treatment as other websites.

I don't imagine this ranking will last (it'll get flagged eventually) and I'm not terribly impressed with the work done to achieve this, though obviously the results are pretty impressive if you're into grey hat/black hat stuff.

Basically - because in this instance, the video will clearly be very sales and conversion focused, advertising the resorts and service. Such content will do really badly on YouTube, which means it may get devalued by Google and therefore rank badly.

Therefore, you'll have nothing to gain from YouTube here and if you put the video on YouTube you risk YouTube outranking your own domain - for your homepage on a fairly small site like that, this could be disastrous. YouTube is a great place for more informational content that isn't tied to a specific sales funnel, but is a dreadful place to put anything more commercial that you really need your site to rank for.

I've written about these principles in depth here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo, here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy and here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-marketing-value-of-youtube

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.

Hi Jennifer,

In short - the answer to both your questions is No. What you're doing is absolutely fine

With YouTube Closed captions - you can upload multiple files - covering multiple languages/descriptive transcripts/speech transcripts. All sorts if you really want to. There is no difference from an SEO perspective between the "captions" model with timecodes or simply the text "transcript". Both are ultimately read like copy text for the video.

The YouTube video embed on an external site is read as an independent media element with the uploaded transcript file as meta-data applied to that media. Even if the on-page copy contains the identical text, it appears as a different form to the engines and is valuable to users as well - there is no "duplicate content" risk, as the content is presented in totally different formats.

I would continue with what you're currently doing - which sounds good :).

Phil

Im afraid i haven't yet found one that is remotely good outside of Wistia (but that's paid).

I'd suggest using excel to put together the elements and then turn the output into plain text - shouldn't be too painstaking, but you will need some element of manual input - i.e. defining the URL, content location and thumbnail location at a minimum.

Hi Claire,

So, in essence - i don't think this is a great idea, primarily because i think it carries enormous risks that will be difficult to manage if you take this approach at scale.

Firstly, what happens if your free clients don't rank following the on-page work and linkbuilding you do?

Assumedly, as they're a free client, there is no contract involved here - so if the work you do doesn't help, then they will likely refuse you access to their site to build links out on while presenting you with a large reputation risk if they decide to negatively "out" your practice. Moreover, the lack of contract again means that you will have no legitimate complaint if they decide, a few months after your work with them, that they want to remove the links and articles you have placed on their site.

Are you being upfront with the free clients about the sites you will link out to on their site? If it's not in their niche, or worse something highly spammy - i can imagine a lot of them getting upset about you using their site to advertise on.

Additionally, this seems like a very expensive and time consuming way to build links for your existing paying clients. if you have to do more SEO and linkbuilding work every time you need to get a new link from a site - you'll be putting in dozens of man hours for only a handful of links on PR2 blogs that you are at risk of losing at the whim of an unhappy webmaster. If however, the plan is to have basically free access to a site after you've  done a little bit of SEO work - then you're basically just taking advantage of the free sites that sign up and again risk losing it all if a few of them become unhappy.

It seems to me that a better way to approach the concept would be to find these decent blogs/sites and then build a strong guest posting relationship with them, offering them quality content in exchange for links. This way, the content containing the links becomes the value you are exchanging, rather than the somewhat intangible SEO work and it's clear what both sides are getting out of the deal on an ongoing basis.

Alternatively, there's nothing wrong with brokering relationships between sites that you work with, allowing them to guest post for each other and strike up an ongoing relationship; I would just be wary of leaving yourself as the middleman, unprotected by any contract or basic trade agreement.

Hope that's helpful,

Phil

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/

Hi July,

Yes - I think it's completely fine to do as you suggest, though I'd recommend seeing if you can leave the text on the page somewhere as well - just so the page isn't too thin on the text front. However, you don't need to put any of those keywords in bold, as Google don't really consider these factors much any more.

One thing I would suggest you think about though is not having the video set to auto-play - as many users find this sort of thing irritating. You should also make sure to host your video away from YouTube in this instance, so use a secure third party platform to serve the video.

Thanks.

Phil

Hi Stephen,

I'd advise you to think of this approach as akin to posting a blog post on your own site and then also posting it on someone else's site as a guest blog post with an adjusted Title and meta description.

It's not going to get you "penalised" for duplicate content as such, but It's hardly a great strategy in the majority of cases - as it will force you to cannibalise possible traffic and link equity across the locations.

First of all, I'd really question why your client wants to do this. If they think that somehow they have to have content on YouTube as it represents a potential traffic source - I'd definitely be keen to point out (in spite of what others have said in answer to your question) that click through rate from YouTube videos back to websites in links and annotations is extremely low. It's very hard to drive any significant amount of traffic from YouTube except through putting videos out at extreme scale (more details here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-marketing-value-of-youtube)

Secondly - I'd suggest asking yourself whether the content in question is really appropriate for a YouTube audience anyway? Do the videos hold their value outside of your clients domain? Is there any search volume on YouTube (use the YouTube keyword tool) for the keywords you're going to be targeting?

If you do want to go down the YouTube + securely hosted route for the same content, then I've detailed the exact technical approach required here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo (approach 4) but bear in mind that it's extremely rare to have content stylistically appropriate for both securely hosting on your site with a paid hosting solution (so you get traffic) and seeding on YouTube (so you can build brand awareness  through that community). If the videos in question are commercial or product focused, I can basically all but guarantee they won't be worth putting on YouTube and they'll potentially outrank your clients site while diluting the overall traffic to the site itself.

So... in short, it's not a problem if you have the right kind of content - but 9 times out of 10 it's not a particularly smart strategy.

I hope that's useful!

Cheers,

Phil.