Smart Traffic SEO Tip #49 – Google Videos Best Practices
Google suggests 3 best practices that help crawlability and indexation of your video content.
Best Practice 1: Verify your video URLs are crawlable – to verify if the video URL is crawlable, check your robots.txt to make sure they are not disallowed. Be sure that the robots.txt file is not blocking any of these URLs specified in the sitemap, playpage, content and player, and thumbnail.
Best Practice 2: Tell us what countries the video may be played in – this is used to tell Google if you want the video restricted in specified territories only. That’s why they recently added the optional attribute “restriction”.
Best Practice 3: Indicate clearly when videos are removed – protect the user experience – sometimes publishers take out videos without signaling the search engines. SOmetimes when users clicks on a search result they’re taken to a page that the video doesn’t exist on anymore or to a different video. This will give negative impact to users due to dissatisfaction. To signal that a video has been removed you can:
1 Return a 404 (Not found) HTTP response code, you can still return a helpful page to be displayed to your users.
2 Indicate expiration dates for each video listed in a Video Sitemap (use the
