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With Google introducing Video sitemaps recently it becomes important for marketers to understand the benefits and protocols when creating a video sitemap. The Google Webmaster Help Center is an excellent resource to answer all your video sitemap related questions.
Google Video Sitemaps is an extension of the Sitemap protocol that enables you to publish and syndicate online video content and its relevant metadata to Google in order to make it searchable in the Google Video index. You can use a Video Sitemap to add descriptive information – such as a video’s title, description, duration, etc. – that makes it easier for users to find a particular piece of content. When a user finds your video through Google, they will be linked to your hosted environments for the full playback.
Google Video’s search algorithm is based on the the video file itself and the video metadata in the Sitemap that is associated with each feed. If provided in your Video Sitemap, your video files are downloaded in order to enhance the searchability of the video and to automatically generate a representative thumbnail image for the video if one is not provided.
Things to remember when creating a video sitemap
- A Video Sitemap should contain only URLs that refer to video content. Video content includes web pages which embed video, URLs to players for video, or the URLs of raw video content hosted on your site. If Google cannot discover video content at the URLs you provide, those records will be ignored by Googlebot.
- Each video is uniquely identified by its content URL (the location of the actual video file) or, if a content URL is not present, a player URL (a URL pointing to a player for the video).
- Each Sitemap file that you provide must have no more than 50,000 video items and must be no larger than 10MB when compressed. An individual video file or thumbnail (specified in the
