September 29th, 2010

Make Your Videos DiscoverableGoogle Video Sitemaps Best Practices

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Today's agenda

• Mark Robertsono Introductionso Overview

• Amy MacIsaaco Specifications

• Nelson Leeo Best practices

• Q&Ao Submit your questions via chat

Nelson Lee

• 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.

Product Manager, Google Video Search Products

Amy MacIsaac

• 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.

Strategic Partner Manager, Google‟s Content Partnerships Team

Video Sitemaps Overview

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)

Video search for video discovery

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

Importance of Google Videos

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

Videos Dominate Universal Search

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

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

Step by step

Specifications: Amy

Video Sitemaps/mRSS 101

Required elements at a glance:

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

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

Best Practices: Nelson

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".

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

Best practices

2. Location of video is unknown:

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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)

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

Best practices

8. Provide expiration date or return a soft 404:

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

Resources

@ Googleo Learn more: Google.com/videositemapso Stay informed: Official Webmaster Central Blogo Start implementing: Read our Help Center articleso Have questions? Post in our Help Forum

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

Q&A

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