Google introduces Video Sitemaps, useful for SEO

When will Yahoo! give in and introduce equal sitemap format?

Google introduced the use of sitemaps for video today. It allows webmasters to let Google know the location and description of their videos, which is undeniably good for video SEO. If you are featuring videos on your site, you can attract a decent amount of traffic if these videos pop up in search results on Google Video. And Google Universal Search which also shows videos.

But the service has received some critique on its own blog, and rightly so. The most important questionable point is that this service is – for now – only useful for Google search. Google representatives say that they hope that other search engines will follow, but this means that we will still have to work with two video sitemaps to upload. Three for the sites that also have a mobile version. And since we work with Yahoo! as well, which demands its own sitemap formats, that means that the total amount of sitemaps we will have to upload is between four and six. We think that it is time for a universal sitemap format, and we suppose Yahoo! will have to come up with it; they have more to gain as Yahoo! is often the second advertising platform after Google, and it is hardly ever the other way around.

We expect Yahoo! to introduce the same format as Google for their sitemaps soon, and think that in the end also video sitemaps will be included into the general sitemaps, making the lives of us SEO specialists a lot easier.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 1:23 am and is filed under Video Advertising. 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.

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