Video Google Sitemaps, is this the start of Google indexing video content from normal sites?

Google recently announced in its webmaster tools blog, that they are extending the sitemaps protocol to include Video. Now I say extending, what I actually mean is that you can upload a second sitemap containing information about the locations of Video on your website.

At the moment, the only ways to get your videos appearing directly in search results pages is to have them listed on one of a number of sites like YouTube, Metacafe, Google Video, MySpace etc, and this sitemap protocol is likely to be the first stage of indexing videos directly from sites rather than social media sites or other aggregators.

I suspect that it will still be some time before video from a site begins to appear in video search results, and probably even longer (if at all) until it starts to appear in the main index in the Universal Search way (see below):

(p.s. that Zero 7 Video is really good, but anyway, I digress…) 

The blog making this announcement also says that you can set Meta data for the video in the sitemap itself. Now this is why I think it might be a long time before video’s from normal sites may not be indexed as we would expect for a while yet. This setting of tags and Meta data is one of the few methods that you can use to attribute words to a video, but like alt tags for images in the past this is really open to spamming.

One advantage of the current system for Google, is that this spamming issue is in many ways circumvented because of the quality control aspects involved with the social media and aggregator sites. Ok, the quality control elements are not that strong, there are plenty of examples of that, and lots of copyrighted material can end up on these sites, but items that are flagrantly abusing guidelines and are seen by the public can be flagged for moderation, and many of these sites require

Related Posts

1. Optimising Video for Search
2. 5 tips to optimise your video content for search
3. YouTube Video Optimisation Tips
4. Google Universal Search – Video optimisation
5. Google Webmaster Tools Errors in Sitemaps
6. Why Is Google Not Indexing Pages Although They Are In Sitemap.xml?
7. SEO Speak: Sitemaps
8. Google Sitemaps – Don’t Need to be Verified

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 1:24 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.