Posting same video on both Vimeo and Youtube
-
A client likes the control of Vimeo Pro for embedding videos on site, but for search purposes would like to create a YouTube channel with the same videos, perhaps with altered titles and descriptions.
This is the same video content in two places - will we run into duplicate content issues?
Thank you,
Stephen
-
Thank you for posting here! We heard your response at Moz and considered the matter settled.
-
I disagree with your assessment and advice here.
Through vimeo pro (which isn't the same as vimeo - confusing, i know) you can get your own site to rank rather than YouTube.com or Vimeo.com, which would likely be the preferable option here. Linking them together then becomes a bad idea - since it makes little sense for users.
Additionally, Google won't rank whichever it thinks is the original, as it has no mechanism to work out whether videos hosted on different platforms are the same thing. In such situations, Google actually rank whichever page is stronger and more relevant - which, for any site with a fairly weak domain - is normally the YouTube.com version.
-
That's not actually true Martin.
YouTube very very rarely drives much traffic back to your site. If you want traffic to your site, you're much better off securely hosting the content and driving traffic from Google with rich snippets - rather than forcing users to go to YouTube and then from there navigate to your site.
-
Hi Stephen,
I'd advise you to think of this approach as akin to posting a blog post on your own site and then also posting it on someone else's site as a guest blog post with an adjusted Title and meta description.
It's not going to get you "penalised" for duplicate content as such, but It's hardly a great strategy in the majority of cases - as it will force you to cannibalise possible traffic and link equity across the locations.
First of all, I'd really question why your client wants to do this. If they think that somehow they have to have content on YouTube as it represents a potential traffic source - I'd definitely be keen to point out (in spite of what others have said in answer to your question) that click through rate from YouTube videos back to websites in links and annotations is extremely low. It's very hard to drive any significant amount of traffic from YouTube except through putting videos out at extreme scale (more details here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-marketing-value-of-youtube)
Secondly - I'd suggest asking yourself whether the content in question is really appropriate for a YouTube audience anyway? Do the videos hold their value outside of your clients domain? Is there any search volume on YouTube (use the YouTube keyword tool) for the keywords you're going to be targeting?
If you do want to go down the YouTube + securely hosted route for the same content, then I've detailed the exact technical approach required here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo (approach 4) but bear in mind that it's extremely rare to have content stylistically appropriate for both securely hosting on your site with a paid hosting solution (so you get traffic) and seeding on YouTube (so you can build brand awareness through that community). If the videos in question are commercial or product focused, I can basically all but guarantee they won't be worth putting on YouTube and they'll potentially outrank your clients site while diluting the overall traffic to the site itself.
So... in short, it's not a problem if you have the right kind of content - but 9 times out of 10 it's not a particularly smart strategy.
I hope that's useful!
Cheers,
Phil.
-
use vimeo as default and Youtube for top3 videos. Youtube will increase trafic for the site and your site will use vimeo best quality videos
-
I would also have a look at Rich Snippets, that way the one you intend to trying to rank can be displayed in the results as you would like
We have used them for lots of videos for clients and got great success optimisting the results we are looking for
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=162163&topic=1088474&ctx=topic
-
You should be completely fine. If for some reason there is a duplicate content issue, Google will just show whichever it thinks is the original video. Giving them different titles and descriptions should also help to differentiate them.
Since you are hoping to take advantage of search for your videos, it will be helpful to link from one of your videos to the other. I'd suggest putting a link on the Vimeo (on the Vimeo site) version pointing to the YouTube version, since that is the one you are hoping to rank.
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
-
Is surfacing top blog posts with read more link could create a boost in traffic to main domain?
Hi mozzers, Because our blog is located on blog.example.com on powered by Wordpress and currently can't migrate it to the main domain, unfortunately. Since we would like to grow our main's domain organic traffic and would like to test an option that could help us leverage the traffic of the top blog posts content. There is a Wordpress API that would allow us to get 100-200 words(snippet of the blog post) from the blog posts into the main domain that would provide a "Read more link" linking back to the blog.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty1986
Is this even a good idea assuming we would make sure content is not identical?0 -
404's after pruning old posts
Hey all, So after reading about the benefits of pruning old content I decided to give it a try on our blog. After reviewing thousands of posts I found around 2500 that were simply not getting any traffic, or if they were there was 100% bounce & exit. Many of these posts also had content with relevance that had long ago expired. After deleted these old posts, I am now seeing the posts being reported as 404's in Google Search Console. But most of them are the old url with "trashed" appended to the url. My question is: are these 404's normal? Do I now have to go through and set up 301's for all of these? Is it enough to simply add the lot to my robots.txt file? Are these 404's going to hurt my blog? Thanks, Roman
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dynata_panel_marketing0 -
What is the Good URL structure for Blog posts
Please let me know what is the goood URL structure for blog posts http://www.abc.com/postname/ or http://www.abc.com/�tegory%/%postname% If Category, Can we name it Blog like website/blog/postname or it is good to use actual categories, and How many categories we can use?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael.Leonard0 -
What is the influence in rankings of a post date?
One of my clients is a glazing company. We found out that al his local pages (city related pages, with titles like 'glazing new york') had an old post date, for example 1 june - glazing etc. (in google). I understand that the influence of freshness depends on the topic, but isn't it bad when dates are too far in the past? sorry for my english - we're an european company 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | remkoallertz0 -
Articles | Posts or Pages
I'm looking to add a number of feature rich articles to educate, promote best practice and provide useful all round advice. My reasearch to date on the pros and cons have drawn me to writing articles as a page, as per
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/#pagesvsposts My Question, etc.
I would like to get an outside opinion on the above. Additionally, how can you find out the site structure of a website.
i.e. what are blog posts or static pages0 -
Guest Posting Good or Too Spammed in 2013
Hi, Some of the Gurus and Associates have indicated that guest posting is the "Directories of today." There are some posts from last year about this in the Q&A, but what is the most recent thought if guest posting on quality sites should be avoided? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Internal links in blog posts?
What's the best strategy for internal links in a blog post? Example, if I write a blog should I always place a link to the main site at the bottom when I place my signature and contact info? Should I just put links in the content? Or should I do both?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
In order to improve SEO with silos'urls, should i move my posts from blog directory to pages'directories ?
Now, my website is like this: myurl.com/blog/category1/mypost.html myurl.com/category1/mypage.html So I use silos urls. I'd like to improve my ranking a little bit more. Is it better to change my urls like this: myurl.com/category1/blog/mypost.html or maybe myurl.com/category1/mypost.html myurl.com/category1/mypage.html Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Max840