Should YouTube videos be added too our sitemap

[WebRiverGroup]

Our company recently started making videos and posting them on our YouTube channel. Should we include the YouTube videos to our sitemap for our main domain?

Thanks,

[PhilNottingham]

You don't need to include them no, and You can't include a sitemap entry for a YouTube video page anyway, only individual pages on your own site.

You can choose to include embedded your YouTube videos in your video sitemap if you wish - (Tutorial for you here: https://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/) But this isn't the best strategy to take if you're trying to get rich snippets (see here: http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy)

I hope that's useful!

[anthonydnelson]

No, you do not need to include links to youtube.com in your website's sitemap. Google has no problems indexing videos on YouTube and your sitemap is meant to help Google index content on your own website.

Video sitemaps are a must if you are using self-hosted videos (ie- not a YouTube video player). To learn the basics of video SEO, go here: http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy