Monday, December 17, 2007 at 11:36 AM
Written by John Fisher-Ogden, Software Engineer, and Amy Wu, Associate Product ManagerIn our effort to help users search all the world's public videos, the Google Video team joined the Sitemaps folks to introduce Video Sitemaps—an extension of the Sitemap Protocol that helps make your videos more searchable via Google Video Search. By submitting this video-specific Sitemap in addition to your standard Sitemap, you can specify all the video files on your site, along with relevant metadata. Here's an example:
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.0">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html</loc>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:player_loc allow_embed="yes">http://www.example.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>
<video:title>My funny video</video:title>
<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
</video:video>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some_other_video_landing_page.html</loc>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/videos/video1.mpg</video:content_loc>
<video:description>A really awesome video</video:description>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>
To get started, create a Video Sitemap, sign into Google Webmaster Tools, and add the Video Sitemap to your account.
50 comments:
Is this an initiative by all Sitemaps participating search engines, or a Google initiative?
@Philipp
From http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80471&topic;=10079:
"Google Video Sitemaps is an extension of the Sitemap protocol..."
I presume that means this is a Google initiative for Google Video (to enable it to become a Search Engine for all videos on the web easily as apposed to mainly YT/GVideo videos).
Seems a real shame to have to generate/maintain two files... Since they have their own namespace, why can't the <video:whatever /> elements simply be added to the standard Sitemaps file instead of having their own dedicated file?
What about YouTube? Will the video content uploaded within the video sitemap also be included in YouTube?
Philipp, yes this is something that we have initiated. It would be great if the other search engines would follow, but we feel it is important that users can get started as soon as possible.
Marcus, that's an interesting idea. I'm not sure how practical it would be in terms of maintenance, but I'll pass it on to the team.
Eduard, the video sitemap file gives us information about videos which are hosted on your site. If you also want to upload them to YouTube, you can do that regardless of this.
Will this allow my video to show within Google Universal Search results?
One thing I am always interested in is the school of thought that having a site map may not actually be good for your rankings. Some people I have talked to suggest that perhaps this is because less prominance is placed on the link anchor text and more empahsis is placed on the sitemap weighting. Is this the case? If so would people just recomend haveing a neutral weighting through a site map? Any thoughs would be appreciated...
Is there any plan to create something similar for Flash movies too?
Search Engine Optimisation, a sitemap file does not replace the linking factors on a site, it just gives us more information about your URLs. There is no reason that it would impact your rankings in a negative way.
So I'm curious if I'm not hosting my own video.. I make the video, it's my content but I load it to video hosting provider then display the video on my site (via JavaScript call). Can I put the page into the < loc > space and the video (from a different domain) into the < video:content_loc > space? or will google think I'm trying to trick them?
This is a great step for telling Google what videos are on the site. How will Google proceed to rank those videos in search results and determine relevance? And will these video publishers be part of the universal search initiative?
Dave, if you look closely at the example there is a flash video. My Question is, if the flash video is an swf, does that mean all SWFs can be put in the sitemap?
Hi folks--
Check out this help article, which answers Dave & Shortshire's questions about which video formats are currently supported (some Flash, but not all), and Liam & David's questions about where and how your videos may appear in Google search.
Shortshire, you may also be interested in this article which explains what that SWF file is doing there (scroll down to the "Video-specific tag definitions" table and check out the entry for <video:player_loc>).
I'd appreciate if it would be possible to submit my existing iTunes-Feeds as a video-sitemap without errors.
If you choose to include a link for the player, are there any rules regarding the use of players which display pre-rolls or other forms of advertisement?
Is youtube using video sitemap now?
is this supposed to replace the existing MRSS-based sitemaps that google was ingesting?
which is the recommended method going forward?
By a sitemap for flash files i mean one that I can use to describe swfs. I have "video" tours on my site, but these are all within swf files rather than flvs
Am I correct in reading that this will not work for videos that are streamed from, e.g., a Flash Media Server?
This is for progressive download videos only?
This is a terrific step. I hope I'm not presumptive to ask if a launch of audio sitemaps (i.e. music files, podcasts, etc.) is on the horizon?
hello
this is great. just what google needs. Video needs to be brought to the front of google rather then on the more bit.
Do video thumbnails have to be a certain pixel size for google to display it????
I think this is a great move by Google... I guess Yahoo and Microsoft will not be far behind!
I have been working on Google Video Sitemaps since they lauched it and have written up an article over at:
Google Video
Sitemaps
In it I include some sample code and images for clarity.
What i wanna know is when they'll begin analyzing the video and indexing the words and objects in the video to determine relevancy for a search.
...I started using them the moment the option was released by Google.
Soon got fed up hand coding the XML file and so created some software to
make the valid XML file.
Now I am giving it away free!
http://www.videositemappro.com
Version 1.0 at the moment but will be adding too it soon.
Plus I think it is the worlds FIRST video sitemap software?
@Marcus:
We recommend against mixing Video Sitemap entries with regular web Sitemap entries because Google is currently the only search engine that supports Video Sitemaps. That means that other search engines (which support that standard Sitemaps protocol, but not the video extension) may have touble reading your Sitemap.
@Joshua:
<loc> obeys the same rules as in regular (web) Sitemaps, which means it has to contain a URL on the same domain as the Sitemap it's in, unless you're submitting it to a search engine (like Google) that allows Sitemap cross-submissions. <video:content_loc> can point to any domain (it doesn't have to be on the same domain as <loc>).
@Michael:
Pre-rolls are fine as long as they're a reasonable length, and as long as the viewer doesn't have to click anything or take any additional steps for the actual video to start playing once the ad is done.
@Piers:
We're currently supporting mRSS on a trial basis for a few partners, and will continue to support those partners. But a Video Sitemap is the recommended method going forward.
@Dave:
It's okay to list SWFs; just make sure to list a thumbnail for each, or we may have trouble indexing them.
@David:
As long as you provide the player and a thumbnail, we can list that video in our index (even though we may not download the actual video content).
Thanks Susan, that really helped. I went with the assumption that this sitemap is not applicable to streaming audio, but I want to ask to be clear.
Is it appropriate to use this Video SiteMap spec to list streaming audio clips for a predominantly audio site, such as NPR.org (daily streaming news clips), or is that an improper use of Video SiteMaps.
Thanks
Hi Javaun,
Right now Video Sitemaps are just for video content; they're intended to help us improve and expand our Video search, and to help people get their videos listed in Google searches.
Since Google doesn't have an audio-specific search right now, I'm not sure if Audio Sitemaps are on the horizon or not; your best bet is probably to list your audio content in your regular web Sitemap for now.
Andrew, there are no size requirements on video thumbnails. Whatever you've got is fine.
Thanks Susan.
I`ve probably missed the answer to this, but, if I already have a Google YouTube Adsense video on my site, Google obviously know about it.
Therefore, would it still be of any benefit to me to create a site map also?
I submitted a video sitemap for one of my sites on the day it became available. Generally how long would it take to see videos show up in google video/the main index with thumbnails?
I have noticed that some videos do not get a thumbnail in universal search. For instance, if you search for the famous "Britney Spears fanatic" video you get many video results in the SERPs, but many of them such as YouTube lack the accompanying thumbnail. Also, I can't find any examples of video thumbnails in the SERPs for videos hosted on parent sites - for example sports videos on ESPN.
I am assuming that the new video algorithm recognizes the following formats - .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv. Why do some videos show thumbnails while others don't? Is there a preferred file format? Do you ever show video thumbnails on non-video aggregating sites?
I have now made a video sitemap. Can I somehow now what videos of mine Google has included in it´s index?
Simple site:mysite.com -search doesn´t work in video search...
There's not a magic formula for this right now. From my observations / experience, video visibility in Google web search is a result of the popularity of a video. And to date, the most popular videos are not BtoC or BtoB, but CtoC. It's all entertainment stuff.
Very few companies actually trigger a high ranking video result for their brand name. The exceptions are those companies with exceptionally popular videos.
My advice: Get your clients videos on as many video engines as you can, and follow basic video optimization best practices. That will at least yield video visibility for brand + keyword/product searches if they have videos for that kind of content.
How about creating it dynamicly? I tried a dynamic php file outputting the requested format but google does not seem to recognize it.
why do the youtube thumbnails only show up on google periodically?
How is the date of the video specified in the video sitemap ?
I do not understand what or why there is a 30 meg limit on the video file. Is Google caching the video file? What happens if the file is larger then 30 meg? Are we suppose to mark it differently in the XML?
@Dave Said "Is there any plan to create something similar for Flash movies too?" I'm asking this too, this is so important forflash based sites And Why 30 meg limit ?
I have been trying to create a video sitemap for almost two days now, for some reason when I submit the sitemap to google webmaster tool is complains about any xml node beginning with < video: which if course is the new set of sitemap nodes specifically for video sitemaps.
Any one have an idea why?? I used the google example and namespaces, it should recognize those elements
I created a Video Sitemap and and my videos are appearing in video.google.com, but it can not play my videos on google even though with my provided address for google I can watch the videos on my browser.
Does the content_loc only point to an flv file or can it be an xml file that gets parsed by my player provided in player_loc?
If this is the case, how is the content_loc information passed into the player in my player_loc?
Should the sitemap hold an entire database of videos or only the last 50 for example?
I'm asking because I work with a website which has over 1000 videos online and that would generate one chunky sitemap. Is there any way to ease the traffic?
I 2nd that question... I have about 50,000 videos on my DB, does Google cache or save the video site maps or should I start doing a setup where I have multiple video site maps tied togther like you can do with regular site maps?
Well I used the gzwrite function to make the file smaller.
But I get the error: unable to read the sitemap... please validate it (something like this, it's in my local language).
Does anyone know a good software to validate a sitemap with explicit error output and/or sugestions?
I have a question. If we provide the location of the raw video file in our sitemap, is there any way in which:
-Google caches the location of the FLV in a way that allows users to access it?
-The video would ever be viewable, in full, without having to go to the landing page on the site? (I don't want the videos viewable directly on Google video search).
I have some nervous product managers and I need to assuage fears.
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