Google Sitemaps

Hi Paul.

1. Is not necessarily true, if you look at our sitemap tutorial (http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/bits-on-the-run/15974/submit-your-videos-to-google), essentially you generate a sitemap with HTTP locations for google, but if RTMP is enabled for accounts the actual video embed codes can still use RTMP no problem.

2. I am not completely sure what method those 'magic' video sitemap companies use, but I do know that there are some severe limitations on how Video sitemaps works that mean that they can't magically submit a video sitemap from you from anywhere, the video sitemap itself NEEDS to be hosted on our server if you wish search results to point to your website (and not to your video on some content aggregator.

The video sitemap example that we provide is as easy as it gets to get a video sitemap on your site, and you can essentially deploy the example with minimal changes as long as you have PHP installed on your server. As far as we are aware a video sitemap like this meets Google's specifications best, so we have no plans to change this (even if this requires a minimum level to implement).

I have explained some of the fundamentals of how video sitemaps work and how Google expects them to work in this blog post: http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/blog/17071/building-a-video-sitemap

Hi Remco, thanks for that. I'll look into it further then.
One more question, I notice in BOTR that we can publish an RSS feed (playlist only, not individual videos?). Will this code be as effective in Google indexing our videos?

Paul

RSS feeds do not have the format that Google expects for sitemaps, but rather these RSS feeds can be used for example for publishing a feed of videos to iTunes.

Hi Remco, thanks for the feedback.

Paul

Hi Remco, I've looked at the BOTR example sitemap and a Google example. This might be a thick question, but where do we get the following from (and do they require any editing for a decent Google sitemap submission?)

player loc
content loc
thumbnail loc

hope you can guide me.

Thanks Paul

If you use the script that is explained here: http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/bits-on-the-run/15974/submit-your-videos-to-google onto your server, these values will be filled out automatically.

Please note that you will need some PHP knowledge to install this on your server, but it isn't particularly hard.

Otherwise you would have to gather all of this by hand which is no fun at all and doesn't scale.

"Otherwise you would have to gather all of this by hand which is no fun at all and doesn't scale"...

So I've discovered!!

I'll try out the PHP solution.

Thanks
Paul

Hi Remco, having trouble with the PHP implementation. Got a video site map almost perfect - just need the video content location?? Which coding & from where on the dashboard. If you could let me know where we find this , I'd be grateful.
I'm going to have to do this manually for the time being.

Thanks in advance.

Paul

I'm not sure what you mean here. What you will need to make sure is that for the "link" field of each video, you fill out the link to the page that you embed the video in on your website.

Everything else should get entered automatically form the API.

Hi Remco, thanks for your help, all sorted now.
(couple of issues with 404 message - player not found, but I've mucked around with it a bit, so Google will hopefully sort it out in time).

One other question. In the PHP file, we have to enter a link as follows: The name of your domain. Only videos that contain a "link" using this domain will be added to the sitemap.
$domain = "xxxxxxxxxxx"

So...my question is; are we able to include a video in our sitemap when it is displayed on another website? Is there any way to do this? Can we add mutiple entries to this field etc?
From the SEO point of view for clients videos, it would be good if this is possible.

Look forward to your thoughts.

Many thanks.

Paul

Google will only index videos that are on the same domain as the sitemap is hosted on and the rest of the site is on. Google will simply disregard any external videos, so there is no SEO benefit to adding videos to your sitemap that are not hosted on your domain.

Hi Remco, thanks for the clarification.

One last question...
I'm sure that you don't want to get involved with Google error messages & the possible solutions, but as this is BOTR php file would you know if there is a solution to this?

- "Make sure these URLs are accessible. We probably encountered a 404 Not Found or other 4xx error. We also may not be able to find the DNS, or may have problems parsing the header. Try the Fetch As Googlebot tool on these URLs to help fix the problem."

(We've 'fetched the G-bot' a few times & our video are DNS masked).

Thanks
Paul

Given the error message it looks like one or more of the links anywhere in the sitemap were broken. It is also possible that the page that you entered as the "link" for one of the videos had a typo.

Hi Remco, thanks for that...
I'll do some investigating.

Many thanks
Paul

Hi Remco, we've noticed that we still get an error message from Google - specific to BOTR and Google's ability to 'fetch' the following information. (but not all the time). It seems that Google are having difficulty finding the location of the player. Seeing that this is BOTR generated code, any ideas??

<video:player_loc allow_embed="yes" autoplay="autostart=true">http://video.mydomain.co.uk/players/C8DWrL7D-oIWf1HPS.swf</video:player_loc>

hope you can help. Thanks.

Paul

I have no idea without a more specific error. Especially if it only happens some of the time I have no idea why this would happen.

Hi Remco, yes, Google Webmaster tools doesn't give much more information. The only feedback we get is as I posted in an earlier thread...."We probably encountered a 404 Not Found or other 4xx error. We also may not be able to find the DNS, or may have problems parsing the header"
So I can't drill down much further.
Strangely, it seems to cure itself when we add another video to the sitemap....strange.

If you do come across why this might happen, let me know!

Thanks again.
Paul

Remco,

You stated, "Google will only index videos that are on the same domain as the sitemap is hosted on and the rest of the site is on. Google will simply disregard any external videos, so there is no SEO benefit to adding videos to your sitemap that are not hosted on your domain."

How does this work when we are using CNAMES for serving our videos hosted with BOTR?

Gregory

Google cares about the pages where the video is embedded in, not about the URL where the videos are hosted on. This means that if your homepage is on http://www.thisisanincrediblewebsite.com/, the video sitemap should be on this domain too. The CNAME record that is used for the video is of no consequence in this respect as Google doesn't care about that.