Youtube, Video SEO, & my site

[uwaim2012]

For our business we are building a collection of videos ranging including product info, how-to's, and some funny content. My understanding is that if you embed these onto my site from youtube you don't get any credit for these videos on the web site even if submitting a video sitemap.

My thinking is to post these videos to youtube and to host them on our own site and submit a video sitemap including the videos on our site. We would change the name, description, etc. on youtube vs. what's o our web site.

Question is - is this the best strategy? Do I get penalized for duplicate content? They are important for both the social aspects of youtube and the content vaue of our web site.

[PhilNottingham]

That sounds like a nice idea and will work nicely for users - you'll just need to consider whether you would rather the YouTube videos or the pages on your site rank for the targeted keywords and optimise everything accordingly. There aren't any duplicate content risks there.

[uwaim2012]

What I meant by "getting credit" is that we are producing these videos and I would like them to be seen as part of the content of my site. On the site, these videos would typically be on a "tips" page with some surrounding text, etc. On youtube, they obviously are a video placed on my youtube channel. The goal on the web site is to build a rich collection of tips and information that would be of value to our customers. On youtube, the videos alone would be of value and could be socialized, etc, with a site overlay.

[PhilNottingham]

Hey,

So, the situation is relatively convoluted and there isn't an absolute right answer to what best practice will be, but hopefully I can offer you some useful advice.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "credit" regarding YouTube videos but I assume you mean rich snippets? In this case, it is indeed true that Google don't often give out video rich snippets for embedded YouTube videos, but instead normally just provide a video result that links to the main YouTube domain - however, within the last couple of weeks they have visibly begun to occasionally offer some more rich snippets for embedded YT videos, but only for high authority blogs and where the blog provides a great deal of supporting content.

That said, you should still summit a video sitemap for any embed YT videos you put up, as you are giving google good metadata about your site that helps them to crawl it better. While you may not get the rich snippet, that does not nullify the value of the sitemap.

I'm not quite sure whether in your proposal you plan to host the versions of the videos on your own site with a third party or with YouTube? If it's the latter and you're simply proposing that the metadata on your page focus's on different terms than the YT video itself, then I would advice against it. In this instance, you almost certainly won't get a rich snippet, as in Googles eyes the embedded video will be broadlyl irrelevant to the focus of the rest of the page. However, having versions on your site hosted with a third party i.e wistia (or self hosted) and then uploading the content to YouTube, essentially as a duplicate, but targeting a different term - this can work. Whether its a good idea or not really depends on the content itself and the audience base the site has.

Another point to recommend is that you should never put promotional or commercially focused content on YouTube - always host that yourself or with a secure third party solution. The user engagement metrics on YouTube are critical in determining whether you will rank both on YT and on Google and if the videos appear algorithmically uninteresting - then your rankings will suffer. Only put content on YouTube that users who find the videos through searching on YouTube will want to watch. How-tos and funny content are great, but stay clear of product information or blatant advertising (unless you are doing PPC YouTube advertising).

Hope that's useful, let me know if you have further questions.

Phil.

Written on my iPad, on a train, so sorry for any typos!

[Francisco_Meza]

I highly doubt you'll get popped for duplicate content because content is going to be on "your" site and the other content is going to be on "youtubes" site. if you are looking to get traffic from YouTube and that's your marketing strategy, that's fine. If not, then sign up for Vimeo Pro: http://vimeo.com/pro

SeoMoz uses Wisita, but I think it's too much.