Submit your Videos to Google

The Google search engine is the most widely used search engine on the web. Making your videos discoverable and indexed by Google is very important. This is why we have implemented video sitemap standards that search engines such as Google use to detect and index videos on the web.

How does it work?

For each account, we automatically render and submit video sitemaps. Google will use these sitemaps to crawl and index websites with Bits on the Run videos. In order for videos to be picked up, there's only three items you have to take care of:

1. Embed your videos on a public website - The embed code must be placed on a publicly accessible URL. Google will not index videos embedded on private intranets or password protected sites.
2. Add a Video Title & Description - The videos you embed must contain proper metadata in Bits on the Run. In particular, the title and descriptio properties are required. You can set these upon video upload, or in the dashboard videos sections.
3. Beware of DNS masking for now - If you embed your videos with content.bitsontherun.com embed codes, you're all set. If you use DNS masking, note that Google does not yet recognize these embed codes as Bits on the Run codes. We are working on resolving this with Google.

That's it. Now you are all set and Google will be able to index your videos. Please note that it can take up to 48 hours before your videos show up in Google's search results. In order to verify indexing, you can search Google video with just your site url.

Push versus Pull

While our Bits on the Run embeds are setup for Google to properly pull metadata from your videos when properly set, it is also possible to push new videos to Google, improving the speed and accuracy of search results. Do this by setting the link property of a video to your website's page that embeds the video. It can be found in the metadata tab of each video in the dashboard:

Google will retrieve the link from our system, visit the page to confirm the video is there, and add the video to its index. As an example, this page on our site contains our JavaScript API webinar, and the Google search results direct to it.

Generating a Video Sitemap

If you want more control over your video SEO (and/or are using DNS masking), you can create your own video sitemap. A video sitemap is basically an XML file that contains the location and metadata for all videos on a particular site. These sitemaps can be provisioned to Google's Webmaster Central. Google will then add the videos to its index.

To get started swiftly, we have created a small PHP file that generates a Video Sitemap for a specific site. It is part of the PHP API Examples download. The script needs only a few options set, and can then be uploaded to your website.

Note that, like our automated video SEO, the script requires the title, description and link properties of your videos to be set.

For more info about Video Sitemaps, check out Google's video sitemaps support pages, or the rich video SEO section at the ReelSEO website.