We previously talked about the importance of submitting a Video Sitemap or mRSS feed to Google and following Google's webmaster guidelines. However, we wanted to offer webmasters an additional tool, so today we're taking a page from the rich snippets playbook and announcing support for Facebook Share and Yahoo! SearchMonkey RDFa. Both of these markup formats allow you to specify information essential to video indexing, such as a video's title and description, within the HTML of a video page. While we've become smarter at discovering this information on our own, we'd certainly appreciate some hints directly from webmasters. Also, to maximize the chances that we find the markup on your video pages, you should make sure it appears in the HTML without the execution of JavaScript or Flash.
So, check out Facebook Share and RDFa and help Google find your videos!
Facebook Share:
RDFa (Yahoo! SearchMonkey):<meta name="title" content="Baroo? - cute puppies" />
<meta name="description" content="The cutest canine head tilts on the Internet!" />
<link rel="image_src" href="http://example.com/thumbnail_preview.jpg" />
<link rel="video_src" href="http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345"/>
<meta name="video_height" content="296" />
<meta name="video_width" content="512" />
<meta name="video_type" content="application/x-shockwave-flash" />
Posted by Michael Cohen, Product Manager, Video Search Team<object width="512" height="296" rel="media:video"
resource="http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345"
xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/media/"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">
<param name="movie" value="http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345" />
<embed src="http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="512" height="296"></embed>
<a rel="media:thumbnail" href="http://example.com/thumbnail_preview.jpg" />
<a rel="dc:license" href="http://example.com/terms_of_service.html" />
<span property="dc:description" content="Cute Overload defines Baroo? as: Dogspeak for 'Whut the...?'
Frequently accompanied by the Canine Tilt and/or wrinkled brow for enhanced effect." />
<span property="media:title" content="Baroo? - cute puppies" />
<span property="media:width" content="512" />
<span property="media:height" content="296" />
<span property="media:type" content="application/x-shockwave-flash" />
<span property="media:region" content="us" />
<span property="media:region" content="uk" />
<span property="media:duration" content="63" />
</object>