Video Sitmap, Is google still index it?? if yes why this not??

Thanks, Paul.

Also, my videos are on S3. I'm not sitemapping my embedded Youtube videos as I would think, being Google's property, they'd know.

Google said it takes hours to a couple of days to index videos (remarks by Nelson Lee of Google on a webinar in September 2010).

I didn't update with Mark's latest GVS plugin, so that could be a possible reason. Will need to re-test.

UPDATE
May have found the reason why my second video isn't being indexed. The Dulisse GVS plugin's generated video sitemap (videositemap.xml) page had rubbish in the <video:content_loc> field for my second video. By viewing the page source of this page, I was able to study the code and discover that the data in this field was obviously wrong. Also, there were only half the fields entered for the video sitemap that I thought would be helpful to satisfy Google.

Beware if you are using this plugin. I would recommend you hand code the video sitemap yourself. It is really easy. If you know HTML, XML will be as easy, if not easier. For a function so critical as informing Google of your pages and videos for purpose of indexing them, you can't afford to leave this to others.

Max

Furthermore, the video sitemap created by the Dulisse GVS plugin :-

• didn't ask me for the "category" of the video. It just went ahead and used the first word of my domain name (before the hyphen) which the video had nothing to do with;
• didn't ask me for any tags for the video, of which you are allowed to put in multiple in the video sitemap;
• didn't give me the option to include a "rating" for the video, 0 to 5.0, which you can include if you do it by hand,

plus a few other minor points.

One not so minor point is that the Dominating Video course says the thumbnail for the video should be 120x90 minimum. This is wrong. It should be 160x120 minimum according to Google's latest information.

I learned all this when I created the videositemap.xml by hand. Had I relied solely on the Dulisse GVS plugin, I would have been more in the fog, as the originator of this thread may have been.

Having said that, having creating the videositemap.xml myself and submitting to Webmaster, the result wasn't good! My second test video (which had the same keywords as the first video) got put in the omitted search results by Google (discovered by doing a site: search on Google video.) Not good!

(The second video was briefly indexed, but the my thumbnail got changed by Google. I had used a 120x90 pixel thumbnail, as Dulisse said, but realized it should be 160x120 pixels, and so I redid the thumbnail image and resubmitted the video sitemap in Webmaster, hoping Google would use my thumbnail, not theirs. It was after I did this that the second video fell into the abyss.)

The second test video (6.5 min) is a much better version of my first test video (0.5 min), which funnily enough is ranking #1 for three and four word keyword phrases in the universal search. So Google is applying some kind of algorithm whose results don't necessarily end up making sense.

I'll keep on testing. I prefer to have fun testing just for the sake of learning than doing it for real as I'm less relaxed and my thinking constricts when money is involved.

Perhaps I shouldn't submit the videositemap to Webmaster but let Google find me naturally? I don't like the way Google treated my second video after I did everything to comply and dot the i's and cross the t's. There is some talk on the yoast site that submitting an ordinary (not video) xml sitemap to Google can work against you. I know from two expert internet marketers' experience that having Google Analytics on your site can act against you.

Another thing I can test is whether to have a separate video sitemap for each video eg create videositemap2.xml for my second video rather than resubmitting an updated version of videositemap.xml containing two videos.

Again, its easy to create your own videositemap.xml. Simply use Google's sample code given in their page on how to create a videositemap. Enter the details of the video in the fields. Save as a notepad document. FTP to the public_html folder of your site. Using Filezilla, rename the document as "videositemap.xml" and your done!

If you get it wrong, no worries. Google even has a page which shows the mistakes you can make and the suggested corrections.

Its worth the small effort to get this right as my crappy half minute first test video is at the top of the universal search results for a few keyword phrases (alas, non money). The video occassionally disappears and reappears, though. The video is hosted on S3 and plays on a test website.

The words my first test video ranks for is based not only on the title of the video but the written content on the page.

Hope this helps. There is a lot of video tutorials on Google video on how to create a video sitemap. No one video has all the information, you need to view a few videos to put it all together. With a modicum of programming proficiency and a few nights work, you can do it. And have fun doing tests to see your video thumbnail show up on at the top of page one of Google's universal search.

Max