We are going to see how about how to create a video sitemap for video portals media rich websites. By creating this video sitemaps we can increase the crawling rate of search engines .A small tutorial from Google web masters tools explaining the generation of Video sitemap
Google supports mRSS, an RSS module that supplements the element capabilities of RSS 2.0 to allow for more robust media syndication. If you publish an mRSS feed for the video content on your site, you can submit the feed’s URL as a Sitemap. For detailed information on creating an mRSS feed, including samples and best practices, please see the Media RSS specification. Google also supports RSS 2.0 using enclosures tags for video content and thumbnail urls.
A Video Sitemap uses the Sitemap protocol, with additional Video-specific tags as defined below. In its simplest form, a Video Sitemap must include a link to a landing page for a video as well as some essential information required for indexing the video. While several fields in the Sitemap are optional, they provide useful metadata that can improve our ability to include your video in search results. Google may use text available on your video’s page rather than the text you supply in the Video Sitemap, if this differs.
Once you have created your video Sitemap, you can submit it to Google using Webmaster Tools. While a Video Sitemap helps Google find content on your site that we might not otherwise discover, we don’t guarantee that all videos included in a Sitemap will appear in our search results, or that we will use all the information included in your Video Sitemap.
Here is a sample of a Video Sitemap entry using Video-specific tags:
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:video=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html</loc>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.site.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:player_loc allow_embed=”yes” autoplay=”ap=1″>http://www.site.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>
<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
<video:title>Grilling steaks for summer</video:title>
<video:description>Get perfectly done steaks every time</video:description>
<video:rating>4.2</video:rating>
<video:view_count>12345</video:view_count>
<video:publication_date>2007-11-05T19:20:30+08:00.</video:publication_date>
<video:expiration_date>2009-11-05T19:20:30+08:00.</video:expiration_date>
<video:tag>steak</video:tag>
<video:tag>meat</video:tag>
<video:tag>summer</video:tag>
<video:category>Grilling</video:category>
<video:family_friendly>yes</video:family_friendly>
<video:expiration_date>2009-11-05T19:20:30+08:00</video:expiration_date>
<video:duration>600</video:duration>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>
Video-specific tag definitions
| Tag | Required? | Description |
| <loc> | Required | The tag specifies the landing page (aka play page, referrer page) for the video. When a user clicks on a video result on a search results page, they will be sent to this landing page. Must be a unique URL. |
| <video:video> | Required | |
| <video:player_loc> | Required | At least one of <video:player_loc> and <video:content_loc> is required. A URL pointing to a flash player for a specific video. In general, this is the information in the “src” element of an <embed> tag and should not be the same as the <loc> tag.
The required attribute The optional attribute Examples: Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?swf=http%3A//s.ytimg.com/yt/swf/cps-vfl87635.swf&video_id=v65Ud3VqChY Dailymotion:http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/x1o2g |
| <video:content_loc> | Required | At least one of <video:player_loc> and <video:content_loc> is required. This should be a .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv, or other video file format, and can be omitted if <video:player_loc> is specified. |
| <video:thumbnail_loc> | Required | A URL pointing to the URL for the video thumbnail image file. We can accept most image sizes/types but recommend your thumbs are at least 160×120 in .jpg, .png, or. gif formats. |
| <video:title> | Required | The title of the video. Limited to 100 characters. |
| video:description> | Require | The description of the video. Descriptions longer than 2048 characters will be truncated. |
| <video:rating> | Optional | The rating of the video. The value must be float number in the range 0.0-5.0. |
| <video:view_count> | Optional | The number of times the video has been viewed |
| <video:publication_date> | Optional | The date the video was first published, in W3C format. Acceptable values are complete date (YYYY-MM-DD) and complete date plus hours, minutes and seconds (YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss). Fraction and time zone suffixes are optional. For example, 2007-07-16T19:20:30+08:00. |
| <video:tag> | Optional | A tag associated with the video. Tags are generally very short descriptions of key concepts associated with a video or piece of content. A single video could have several tags, although it might belong to only one category. For example, a video about grilling food may belong in the Grilling category, but could be tagged “steak”, “meat”, “summer”, and “outdoor”. Create a new <video:tag> element for each tag associated with a video. A maximum of 32 tags is permitted. |
| <video:category> | Optional | The video’s category. For example, cooking. The value should be a string no longer than 256 characters. In general, categories are broad groupings of content by subject. Usually a video will belong to a single category. For example, a site about cooking could have categories for Broiling, Baking, and Grilling |
| <video:family_friendly> | Optional | “No” if the video should be available only to users with SafeSearch turned off. |
| <video:duration> | Optional | The duration of the video in seconds. Value must be between 0 and 28800 (8 hours). Non-digit characters are disallowed. |
| <video:expiration_date> | Optional | The date after which the video will no longer be available, in W3C format. Acceptable values are complete date (YYYY-MM-DD) and complete date plus hours, minutes and seconds (YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss). Fraction and time zone suffixes are optional. For example, 2007-07-16T19:20:30+08:00. |
When creating your Video Sitemap, keep in mind the following:
- A Video Sitemap should contain only URLs that refer to video content. Video content includes web pages which embed video, URLs to players for video, or the URLs of raw video content hosted on your site. If Google cannot discover video content at the URLs you provide, those records will be ignored by Googlebot.
- Since each video is uniquely identified by its content URL (the location of the actual video file) or, if a content URL is not present, a player URL (a URL pointing to a player for the video), you must include either the
<video:player_loc>or<video:content_loc>tags. If these tags are omitted and we can’t find this information, we’ll be unable to index your video. - Each Sitemap file that you provide must have no more than 10,000 video items and must be no larger than 10MB uncompressed. An individual video file or thumbnail (specified in the
<video:content_loc>and<video:thumbnail_loc>tags, respectively) can be no larger than 30MB. If you have more than 10,000 videos, you can submit multiple Sitemaps and a Sitemap index file. - Google can crawl the following video file types: .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv. All files must be accessible via HTTP. Metafiles that require a download of the source via streaming protocols are not supported.
- The URLs included in the Sitemap must have their robots.txt file set appropriately for User-agent “Googlebot”.
- If you have multiple videos embedded on the same html page, use separate
<video:video>entries for them with different<video:player_loc>or<video:content_loc>information. - Google web crawlers will verify that the information you include in the
<video:title>and<video:description>fields matches your live site. You should view your play pages in a browser such as Lynx to make sure Googlebot will be able to find them.
Tags: mRSS feed, video sitemap
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 2:10 am and is filed under SEO & SEM News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
