Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Do YouTube videos in iFrames get crawled?
-
There seems to be quite a few articles out there that say iframes cause problems with organic search and that the various bots can't/won't crawl them. Most of the articles are a few years old (including Moz's video sitemap article). I'm wondering if this is still the case with YouTube/Vimeo/etc videos, all of which only offer iFrames as an embed option.
I have a hard time believing that a Google property (YT) would offer an embed option that it's own bot couldn't crawl. However, let me know if that is in fact the case.
Thanks!
Jim
-
Hi Joricia,
What do you use for transcribing? I've tried Dragon but it's video transcription function is useless. Don't really have the money to get everything manually transcribed.
Thanks,
Jim
-
If you do not want to take the gamble with I-frames and want to be certain that your content is found by Google I would use Wistia it comes with everything that you need in order to have a video indexed the proper embed code, video site map and schema you can use third-party companies like "speechpad" to transcribe what is being spoken. Wistia also offers A similar service.
If you do choose to use YouTube I would reembed the video with embedly rember you will have to create your own video XML sitemap, add your own schema you may use to YouTube content to a website without having to worry about Google not being able to index because the I-frame is converted into a readable code.
This is a great resource on video SEO. Because I can tell you using Frist hand by using this method it will work.
https://www.distilled.net/blog/video/video-seo-tactics-to-get-ranked/
Sorry I did not explain more in my first response.
Tom
-
They all sort of help, but basically just reconfirms what's out there... nobody seems to know for sure. It seems iframes sometimes get crawled but sometimes not. For Mobile, Google recommends iframes but doesn't say specifically that they get crawled and then elsewhere they say there's limited support for them.
It's frustrating Google can't just provide clear guidance on the subject.
While the answer might be Vzaar or Wistia, they have drawbacks and there are times where YouTube is the better choice even if you use one of the other services. So understanding the best way to embed them seems important.
-
Hi Jim!
Do any of these responses help?
-
Google actually can crawl iframes, but the support is limited. Try indexing it with robots.txt or add the URL of the frame you'd like to have crawled in Google Webmaster Tools. Since an iframe is basically an HTML document inside an HTML document, it's not going to crawl the whole page together with the iframe, making its SEO value lower than if it were outside the iframe. A good tactic is to also have content surrounding the iframe on page that describes what is inside the iframe.
And since we're on the topic of videos inside iframes, make sure you have transcripts for it. Google does use those as well as deaf users, so you're doing a good turn for your client and for those with disabilities.
But to answer the root of your question, you're right we don't actually know if Google has a system setup to specifically make it easier to crawl Youtube videos inside iframes. As transparent as Google has been this past year they're still pretty mysterious overall.
-
iframes do not get crawled but there are other ways or Google to see videos that link back to your site Moz uses Wistia.com they are spectacular and their embed code and site map make them easily findable
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why images are not getting indexed and showing in Google webmaster
Hi, I would like to ask why our website images not indexing in Google. I have shared the following screenshot of the search console. https://www.screencast.com/t/yKoCBT6Q8Upw Last week (Friday 14 Sept 2018) it was showing 23.5K out 31K were submitted and indexed by Google. But now, it is showing only 1K 😞 Can you please let me know why might this happen, why images are not getting indexed and showing in Google webmaster.
Technical SEO | | 21centuryweb0 -
Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google?
Hi, we re-branded and launched a new website in February 2016. In June we saw a steep drop in the number of URLs indexed, and there have continued to be smaller dips since. We started an account with Moz and found several thousand high priority crawl errors for duplicate pages and have since fixed those with canonical tags. However, we are still seeing the number of URLs indexed drop. Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google? I can't seem to find a definitive answer on this. A good portion of our URLs have canonical tags because they are just events with different dates, but otherwise the content of the page is the same.
Technical SEO | | zasite0 -
How can I get a photo album indexed by Google?
We have a lot of photos on our website. Unfortunately most of them don't seem to be indexed by Google. We run a party website. One of the things we do, is take pictures at events and put them on the site. An event page with a photo album, can have anywhere between 100 and 750 photo's. For each foto's there is a thumbnail on the page. The thumbnails are lazy loaded by showing a placeholder and loading the picture right before it comes onscreen. There is no pagination of infinite scrolling. Thumbnails don't have an alt text. Each thumbnail links to a picture page. This page only shows the base HTML structure (menu, etc), the image and a close button. The image has a src attribute with full size image, a srcset with several sizes for responsive design and an alt text. There is no real textual content on an image page. (Note that when a user clicks on the thumbnail, the large image is loaded using JavaScript and we mimic the page change. I think it doesn't matter, but am unsure.) I'd like that full size images should be indexed by Google and found with Google image search. Thumbnails should not be indexed (or ignored). Unfortunately most pictures aren't found or their thumbnail is shown. Moz is giving telling me that all the picture pages are duplicate content (19,521 issues), as they are all the same with the exception of the image. The page title isn't the same but similar for all images of an album. Example: On the "A day at the park" event page, we have 136 pictures. A site search on "a day at the park" foto, only reveals two photo's of the albums. 3QolbbI.png QTQVxqY.jpg mwEG90S.jpg
Technical SEO | | jasny0 -
Will Google crawl and rank our ReactJS website content?
We have 250+ products dynamically inserted and sorted on our site daily (more specifically our homepage... yes, it's a long page). Our dev team would like to explore rendering the page server-side using ReactJS. We currently use a CDN to cache all the content, which of course we would like to continue using. SO... will Google be able to crawl that content? We've read some articles with different ideas (including prerendering): http://andrewhfarmer.com/react-seo/
Technical SEO | | Jane.com
http://www.seoskeptic.com/json-ld-big-day-at-google/ If we were to only load the schema important to the page (like product title, image, price, description, etc.) from the server and then let the client render the remaining content (comments, suggested products, etc.), would that go against best practices? It seems like that might be seen as showing the googlebot 1 version and showing the site visitor a different (more complete) version.0 -
Can spiders crawl jQuery Fancy Box scripts
Hi Everyone - I'm not a technical person at all. I have some content that will be hidden until a user clicks "learn more" where upon it will be displayed via jQuery Fancy Box script. The content behind the learn more javascript is important and I need it to be crawled by search engine spiders. Does anyone know if there will be a problem with this script?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Googlebot Crawl Rate causing site slowdown
I am hearing from my IT department that Googlebot is causing as massive slowdown/crash our site. We get 3.5 to 4 million pageviews a month and add 70-100 new articles on the website each day. We provide daily stock research and marke analysis, so its all high quality relevant content. Here are the crawl stats from WMT: http://imgur.com/dyIbf I have not worked with a lot of high volume high traffic sites before, but these crawl stats do not seem to be out of line. My team is getting pressure from the sysadmins to slow down the crawl rate, or block some or all of the site from GoogleBot. Do these crawl stats seem in line with sites? Would slowing down crawl rates have a big effect on rankings? Thanks
Technical SEO | | SuperMikeLewis0 -
Video Sitemaps <video:content_loc>and<video:player_loc></video:player_loc></video:content_loc>
Hi guys, If I'm creating a video sitemap do I need to use both: video:content_locandvideo:player_loc</video:player_loc></video:content_loc> Or could I just use video:content_loc?</video:content_loc> Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tug-Agency0 -
Robots.txt file getting a 500 error - is this a problem?
Hello all! While doing some routine health checks on a few of our client sites, I spotted that a new client of ours - who's website was not designed built by us - is returning a 500 internal server error when I try to look at the robots.txt file. As we don't host / maintain their site, I would have to go through their head office to get this changed, which isn't a problem but I just wanted to check whether this error will actually be having a negative effect on their site / whether there's a benefit to getting this changed? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | themegroup0