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I have been asked to add 3 short informational videos to a new page on the company website. I am trying to figure out if it would be better to embed them directly onto the page (html5) or use Vimeo or YouTube. Which would be better from a Google ranking point of view after the recent Panda updates?

Naturally we would want to the whole site to benefit not just that 1 video page.

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Avoid Vimeo but not because of SEO. Per their guidelines, http://vimeo.com/guidelines, they do not allow commercials and from everything I have read they can be very strict about this so if your videos come across as anything more than informational you may end up having to move hosts.

That leaves you with YouTube or hosting your own. Using YouTube is great because it puts your video into the second most popular search engine on the web, YouTube. Secondly, it allows you to embed a video on your site that Google already knows about so there is some SEO value for Google's search engine but it won't be any more than what you get from posting the videos with HTML5 with the proper tags.

That leads me to posting the video yourself. This is a great solution especially, if your video is going to be longer or 15 minutes, the current cap on Videos on YouTube. If you do go this route, make sure to check out http://schema.org/VideoObject so you know how to post your videos in a way that maximizes SEO.

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  • The plan is to make the videos 4-5mins each and have all 3 on the 1 page in sections. Will follow schema.org guidelines as hadn't thought of those and will host them myself initially. Thx. – Ubique Mar 6 '12 at 18:11
  • For the record, Vimeo do have a business package: vimeo.com/pro - but $200 for 3 short clips is insane. – CJM May 10 '12 at 16:13
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It's not going to make a difference and the Panda algorithm isn't going to be a factor in this since it deas with lots of low quality content. Three pages of anything definitely isn't a lot. Use whatever is easier for you to manage. If you use Vimeo or Youtube you save yourself a lot of trouble and bandwidth. But if you find working with video to be easy and don't expect these videos to be viewed a lot, then host it yourself and have one less account to worry about.

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  • Bandwidth is certainly a consideration. I could host myself initially and move to YT at a later date from what you are saying. Thx. – Ubique Mar 6 '12 at 18:09
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would be better to embed them directly onto the page (html5) or use Vimeo or YouTube.

I would suggest not using html5 to embed your videos because there are many people using older browsers which do not include the new version of html, html5.

Youtube would probably be the best choice, not necessarily for SEO reasons, but because it will drive additional traffic from people on youtube.

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I would go with Youtube, once you generate the embed code be sure to uncheck the option to display related videos after yours ends. Also create a video sitemap and submit that to Google. Also Youtube videos tend to show up in search results over Vimeo.

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  • My understanding so far is that the latest Google update is rewarding websites that have video content on them, so am leaning towards the self hosting option. – Ubique Mar 7 '12 at 1:15
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I've heard more than one SEO expert say that hosting videos yourself yields better results. If you do host your videos yourself, in addition to applying the schema markup, also implement an XML video sitemap.

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  • That's what I heard too... fair point about the site map. Thx – Ubique Mar 8 '12 at 22:28
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Youtube is not free, read the smallprint - you are paying by giving away ownership of the video.

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