Google Video Can Now Index External Videos via Sitemaps

On the official Google Webmaster Central Blog, John Fisher-Ogden and Amy Wu announced that in order to help users search for public videos, the Google Video team joined the Google Sitemaps team to create Video Sitemaps.  Video Sitemaps essentially indexes your videos based on the metadata that you provide.  The metadata is then crawled by Google Video after you submit the video, making it so that Google Video users can find your content without having to upload a video.

An example of the Video Sitemap XML code:

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9”
     xmlns:video=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.0“>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html</loc>
<video:video>
   <video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
   <video:player_loc allow_embed=”yes”>http://www.example.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123
</video:player_loc>
   <video:title>My funny video</video:title>
   <video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg
</video:thumbnail_loc>
</video:video>
</url>

<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some_other_video_landing_page.html</loc>
<video:video>
   <video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/videos/video1.mpg
</video:content_loc>
   <video:description>A really awesome video</video:description>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>

As you will notice, the Video Sitemap asks you to provide information such as the video title, duration, description, video location, and thumbnail location.  Google Video can crawl videos that are MPGs, MPEGs, MP4s, MOVs, WMVs, ASFs, AVIs, RAs, RAMs, RMs, and FLVs.

More information about using Video Sitemaps is available here.

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