In the past, the only way to get Goggle to index the YouTube videos on your school blogs and program pages, was to create a video sitemap. This was often so confusing for colleges and universities that video sitemap plugins have been developed solely to help make it easier. Furthermore, creating a sitemap didn’t always guarantee that they would be indexed as YouTube videos. In fact, it often didn’t work at all.
Well, it seems that Google is now indexing embedded YouTube videos, without the video sitemap hurdle. The discovery was made by the folks at ReelSEO, who noticed the change and then tested it. What they discovered is that you can get your embedded YouTube videos indexed automatically and quickly, simply by using YouTube’s new frame method (which is their new default embed option). The next time your program pages are crawled, any embedded vids will be indexed in Google videos. Simple and unexpected.
As ReelSEO states, the reason Google did not index embedded videos was likely to avoid a mess of duplicate content and to help maximize ad revenue (by driving all the traffic to the Google-owned YouTube.com). For whatever reason, this is no longer the case.
The change brings up a number of relevant education marketing discussions. For one thing, effective web content can no longer be restricted to text. Now more than ever, your program pages and student blogs should include a variety of media formats, with YouTube videos prominent among them. Not only can they liven up your content, they can now also help boost your online presence.
The flip side to that coin, however, is that there is a very real chance that this increase in online visibility can also lead to more frustrated searchers (a video may not always be the main point of the page it is embedded on). Clearly, there is going to be a learning curve, one which may even affect the way multimedia content is created, posted and shared. Stay tuned.
What do you think about this change?
