Assume we have a VOD platform to watch online videos and it requires authentication to show that video or any kind of content. User has to be signed up and after that, they can access the videos etc. Those videos are really important for the website SEO and I'm wondering how can the search engine crawlers access the content that ordinarily requires an authentication process to access?
1 Answer
Is authentication required to access the webpage the video lives on, or only to play the video? The latter is better for SEO.
Googlebot and other search engine crawlers cannot pass authentication, so if that is required to access the content that is on the webpage (for example, video title, video description, and other written details) then there is not enough context for the webpage to rank highly in search results.
Googlebot needs some information to know how to rank the page, even if the video itself requires authentication to play.