Google Introduces Video Sitemaps
December 21, 2007 by Mike Abundo
Filed under Computers
You know those cool thumbnails YouTube videos get in Google search results? Earlier this year, Google expanded that feature to results from other major video sites. Now even videos hosted on personal sites can get that extra visibility in the SERPs.
Google has long offered a sitemap protocol to help webmasters get their nonvideo content indexed. Now they’re introducing video sitemaps, complete with the ability to have your videos thumbnailed and played from within Google search results.
Thumbnailing videos from across the Web was the main draw of Yahoo Video; now Google can do it too. Google’s nonvideo sitemap protocol is now industry-standard; expect their new video sitemap protocol to become the same.
The technology still relies on human-entered text metadata, though. We all know Google is working on ways to automatically extract metadata from the videos themselves. Wonder when they’ll incorporate those.
In the meantime, I need a WordPress plugin to automate video sitemap updates for my personal blogs, preferably integrated with the FLV Embed plugin. If anyone can make that plugin, I’ll happily plug it here.
A video sitemap plugin… what a great idea.
I have just created the worlds first Google Video Sitemap Software:
http://www.videositemappro.com
Enjoy!
-Marc Liron
“In the meantime, I need a WordPress plugin to automate video sitemap updates for my personal blogs…” “If anyone can make that plugin, I’ll happily plug it here.”
I’m going to hold you to that when I create another VideoPress plugin to do that :-)
http://getvideopress.com/
(VideoPress is part of Show in a Box — http://showinabox.tv/ )
– Charles Iliya Krempeaux
http://changelog.ca