Smart Traffic SEO Tip #64 – Specifying Location Tags in Video Sitemaps
When adding video information to a Sitemap or mRSS feed you must specify the location of the video. This include one of the two tags either “video:player_loc” or “video:content_loc. The equivalent tags for mRSS feed are “media:player” or “media:content” respectively. According to this article (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/08/video-sitemaps-understanding-location.html), Google need this information to verify that there’s actually a live video on your page and extract metadata and signals from it for ranking. If one of these tags is not included, then Google will not able to verify your video and your Sitemap and mRSS feed will not be crawled.
Definition of video locations:
•Player Location/URL – the player (Ex, .swf) URL with corresponding arguments that load and play the actual video.
•Content Location/URL – the actual raw video bytes (Ex, .flv, .avi) containing the video content.
The requirement is only one of the two tags is required either the player location “video:player_loc” or content location “video:content_loc”. But it is highly advisable to include both since each of them have important purposes, player location which is used to help verify that a video exists on a page and the content location that helps Google in extracting more signals and metadata for your videos ranking.
*Image taken from the Google Webmaster Central Blog
