Videos on the site or hosted elsewhere

Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

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Videos on the site or hosted elsewhere

followgreg

4:10 am on Jun 28, 2009 (gmt 0)

I have a hard time figuring out the best strategy. We are preparing series of videos for one of our sites and we can host them all no problem.

Now from the SEO standpoint: what's the best? Will Google pick up videos on our site even if we don't host on Youtube?

I don't want to host on Youtube anyway, but will Google should our on page videos on its SERPs? (provided that our site has a bit of authority)

tedster

7:35 am on Jun 28, 2009 (gmt 0)

My experience has been that Google Video Search tends to rank videos hosted on external services (not just YouTube) higher than locally hosted videos - even when you submit a video sitemap.

followgreg

11:44 pm on Jun 28, 2009 (gmt 0)

Thanks Tedster. But do you mean that the actual page on your site will rank higher or the page on the video sharing site?

tedster

11:55 pm on Jun 28, 2009 (gmt 0)

My experience is that the video sharing site will rank better almost all the time - both on Google Image Search and therefore also on Universal Search when video search is integrated. If you have more and better on-topic content for your landing page that also includes a video - then that page may rank for some terms based on the rest of the content - but it will usually be a text search ranking, not a video ranking.

I also expect to see this situation evolve over time. I think it's an artifact of this particular moment in time and not anything permanent. However, since many SMB sites do not want to cover the bandwidth involved in hosting their own video, it's likely to change slowly.