Best practice for video content

Google’s goal with video search (as with web search) is to provide the best and most relevant results to users. So, how do you try and make sure your videos will be returned in the search results?

The Webmaster Central blog has some great video best practice tips, and the top three are highlighted  below:

• Verify your video URLs are crawlable: check your robots.txt
  • Make sure your robots.txt file isn’t blocking any of the URLs specified in your Sitemap. This includes URLs for the:
    • Playpage
    • Content and player
    • Thumbnail

• List which countries the video may be played in
• Indicate when videos are removed to protect the user experience
  • Sometimes publishers take videos down but don’t signal to search engines that they’ve done so. This can result in the search engine’s index not accurately reflecting content of the web.
    

For more information on Google Videos, visit the blog