Should I delete youtube videos when moving to Wistia (or other on-site platform)?
-
One of my new clients recently built a site that has a great potential for ranking product pages with video rich snippets. Each product page has a single video, but they are currently hosted on youtube and embedded using Youtube iframes.
Overall the videos aren't a great fit for Youtube, and we have decided to move the product videos to Wistia. (Much thanks to Phil Nottingham for his answers in this post, and his overall insights on video SEO in general). So what is the best way to make sure we get original credit for the video? I'm planning to take down all the product videos from the Youtube account as soon as we switch the embeds on the site. Is that enough?
-
Second Phil on this one: "You can find that YouTube will outrank your pages, which splits your traffic and view count, thereby damaging your SEO" This is the major issue here.
-
I do agree that video helps with conversion, but I also agree that Youtube isn't the right place for these conversion type videos. Even with a high conversion rate, they aren't being watched enough for it to have an effect in this case. (Each video has <50 views over 3 months)
-
Thanks so much Phil,
I didn't even realize there was an option for "unlisted". Because these are the ever-difficult-to-get-links-to product pages, I am hoping to try to get a few sites that have already embedded the videos to switch to the custom player.
-
Actually, this isn't quite true Moosa...
Very few people convert from watching YouTube videos and the CTR back to a site in order to make purchases is typically less than 1%.
-
Not true. Just because a video is on YouTube, it doesn't mean it'll rank better than if it is self hosted.
-
No, don't do this, it's a bad idea.
Just because you have content assets doesn't mean you should put them everywhere (it's the same principle as syndicating a blog post). If the content isn't relevant for an audience on YouTube, which product/sales focused videos typically aren't, then they shouldn't be on there. Content should be created for the YouTube channel, not just put on there because you have it.
Additionally, self hosting your content and putting it on YouTube can have negative technical impacts. You can find that YouTube will outrank your pages, which splits your traffic and view count, thereby damaging your SEO; you're also failing to optimise for YouTube in this way, since you won't be driving any YouTube views through the video embeds.
For product videos, the goal is never to get as many people to see them as possible, but rather to drive as many sales as possible, which means you need to get people to view the content in a context where they can make a purchase (not on YouTube, since there's no "buy" button).
-
Hey Sirmontegu,
Basically, I'd recommend you just mark the YouTube videos as unlisted (which is like putting a noindex tag on your videos) so that user experience isn't damaged for anyone who has already linked to the videos and you'll retain the view count on your channel (good for social proof) but will also ensure your YouTube videos don't outrank the canonical version on your site, as well as ensuring your more YouTube friendly content is prominent on your channel.
Then all you need to do is ensure you're submitted a video sitemap (with the Wistia toolset) and you should get the videos indexed on your site.
Cheers,
Phil.
-
I guess Eric is right just let them be on youtube and also make sure they are ranking high when someone search for it on youtube.
The percentage of people who convert after watching a video online (big number watch videos on youtube) so this is good for your conversions as well.
Hope this helps!
-
I would keep them on YouTube. Since YouTube is owned by Google, they rank their videos higher on Google higher searches so you don't want to lose that. I agree with Eric. If anything, keep them in both places.
-
I would keep the videos on YouTube. In fact, it's usually recommended that you post them on multiple video sites for additional distribution. Even though you're not necessarily going to link to the YouTube videos from your site, you'll often get people who will view them there. And you can't ignore YouTube since it does have the most traffic.
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
-
Video Testimonials Vs Text Testimonials
If I place video testimonials as embedded youtube iframes into my webpage - will it improve my visitor retention rate for that page?
Image & Video Optimization | | Lana9401 -
Video page duplicates (that aren't really duplicates)
Hi. My company has a 1000 videos, each of the videos appear on their own page that follows the same template. The title is of course different / videos linked to / etc. Google is reporting them as "duplicate content". What should I do to differentiate these pages enough so that google can recognized that they are different pages?.
Image & Video Optimization | | adamorn0 -
How to embed a video in our product image
Hi We use bigcommerce and want to add a video to each product . We want to add a video link in the corner of the product image and have the video play when this tab is clicked. Can anyone tell us how to do this Regards
Image & Video Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
Does duplicate content damage ranking in YouTube the same way it does on websites?
I'm asking this question due to the following scenario: When we have videos produced by Third Party video companies they upload the video to their YouTube account before us (the customer), has chance to upload it to ours. If this was an article that was uploaded to the web then the website uploading it first would be classed as the original piece and all other website uploading the article would be considered duplicates and not rank (As I believe). Hence my question, does YouTube work in the same way and hence our videos when searched in YouTube be secondary to our Third Party video companies as they are posting them first? Regards, Tom
Image & Video Optimization | | CoGri0 -
Amazon RTMP S3 vs Vimeo PRO vs Wistia? (Download Protection)
Context: A membership site, focused on a Russian market which is known to culturally pirate everything they see. Granted: ultimately you cannot hide video as a person can take a screen-capture/video camera method ultimately. Having said that. Is it still worth going the RTMP S3 route? Vs say Vimeo and Wistia. Will it help a bit or its a technology that is dying? Also with Vimeo PRO vs Wistia generally Vimeo is better value, but how is their analytics compared to Wistia (per user stats) if possible? Vimeo is a very popular, therefore downloaded 3rd party apps exist plentifully, is Wistia's platform unique to Vimeo in terms of its embed format if its same format this means that the commonly available tools as for Vimeo will work for Wistia, how ever if its different, and less popular as RTMP S3 is in this case less tools are available for it. Is that the case for Wistia?
Image & Video Optimization | | vmialik0 -
YouTube Demographics
Hi Mozzers, Is it possible to do YouTube-specific keyword research? I have a client who sells wine making franchises and wants to produce a video for prospective franchisees. I doubt people are looking for this on YouTube and want some data to support my case so I can push the project in a more meaningful direction.
Image & Video Optimization | | waynekolenchuk0 -
What is the best way to embed a link back to our site in our video embed codes?
Our site has over 100 great videos. We are currently streaming them all from our YouTube channel. I noticed SEOMoz is using http://www.wistia.com and that when I copy and paste a video from SEOMoz that code has a link back to the SEOMoz site in it, which of course is awesome for SEO. My question has several parts: Is this possible to do with an embed code from YouTube? Specifically directed towards SEOMoz: Which of the 3 types of player did you choose, HTML5, Flash or javascript? Why? Is Wistia just creating a video feed, or are they actually hosting your video content too? Our goal is two-fold: 1. We want people who embed our videos to be also embeddding a link back to our site and 2. We want our videos to be found in SERPs and have those direct people to our site instead of our YouTUbe channel. I'd welcome any comments regarding video SEO in this thread. Thanks!
Image & Video Optimization | | danatanseo0 -
Best practice using Video to increase website pagerank?
Goal: Leverage videos to get links and traffic back to website not video hosting platform site (e.g. YouTube) to generate website leads **Issue: ** If we place a video on a website using video YouTube embed code and video sitemap for the crawlers to index our video DOES show up in search results BUT that link goes back to YouTube. Great for increasing views on YouTube but not increasing link popularity for client website. Question: What are recommendations / best practice for SEO (such as using another player like Viddler, etc.) that will get video results from search engines back to the website? We want to leverage videos to build links and generate leads to client site.
Image & Video Optimization | | jfeitlinger0