Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Google Videos best practices

Webmaster Central Blog

Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index

Friday, June 11, 2010

best practices

Best Practice 1: Verify your video URLs are crawlable: check your robots.txt

Sometimes publishers unknowingly include video URLs in their Sitemap that are robots.txt disallowed. Please make sure your robots.txt file isn't blocking any of the URLs specified in your Sitemap. This includes URLs for the:
- Playpage
- Content and player
- Thumbnail
More information about robots.txt.

Best Practice 2: Tell us what countries the video may be played in

Is your video only available in some locales? The optional attribute “restriction” has recently been added (documentation at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472), which you can use to tell us whether the video can only be played in certain territories. Using this tag, you have the option of either including a list of all countries where it can be played, or just telling us the countries where it can't be played. If your videos can be played everywhere, then you don't need to include this.

Best Practice 3: Indicate clearly when videos are removed -- protect the user experience

Sometimes publishers take videos down but don't signal to search engines that they've done so. This can result in the search engine's index not accurately reflecting content of the web. Then when users click on a search result, they're taken to a page either indicating that the video doesn't exist, or to a different video. Users find this experience dissatisfying. Although we have mechanisms to detect when search results are no longer available, we strongly encourage following community standards.

To signal that a video has been removed,
1. Return a 404 (Not found) HTTP response code, you can still return a helpful page to be displayed to your users. Check out these guidelines for creating useful 404 pages.
2. Indicate expiration dates for each video listed in a Video Sitemap (use the <video:expiration_date> element) or mRSS feed (<dcterms:valid> tag) submitted to Google.

Help CenterHelp ForumPosted by Nelson Lee, Product Manager, Video Search

Labels: advanced , beginner , crawling and indexing , intermediate

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