Create a video sitemap and publish videos to Google with VIXY's syndication feature

While Google can index video content on its own, it still can’t “read” a video the way it can read textual content. You can lend Google a helping hand by creating a video sitemap. In this article, we show you how to create a video sitemap with VIXY

VIXY makes video sitemap creation even easier through its video syndication feature (In VIXY: check the Video Syndication tab under Content).

With video syndication, you can make sure your whole video library gets indexed at once by Google or other destinations like Roku or Yahoo. Alternatively, you can decide to only push a selection of videos to Google by choosing to create a sitemap for a video playlist instead of your whole video archive. 

Follow the next steps to get started with video syndication:

Step 1: Create a syndication feed for Google with a video sitemap

To do this, go to the Syndication tab under the Content menu and select ‘Add feed’:

You will see the following screen:

Name: give the video sitemap publication a name for internal purposes. 

Content: select if you want to publish all your videos to Google, or a selection of videos by selecting a playlist of entries. 

Destination: select Google. 

Note: With VIXY you can also create a syndication feed to publish your videos with an XML sitemap to 3rd party destinations/platforms. 

Google Parameters

Select how you want your videos to appear on Google under ‘Google Parameters’. First, select the transcoding profile, we recommend selecting ‘Source’ (always available) or the 1080P rendition for publication to Google. Please note that you can only publish one rendition/flavor so it’s advised to choose a flavor that is available on most videos under your account. 

Landing page: Select the landing page that you want to publish with your videos to Google. If people click on the video thumbnail, they will get redirected to this page to watch the video. We advise including an overview page where most of your videos are embedded. 

Playback: decide if you want to give Youtube the right to playback the video directly in Google (not always honored) or link back to your site. We recommend the latter.

That’s it, you created your first syndication feed! Now select this feed for publication. 

Step 2: Copy your video sitemap and check if all the parameters are correct

Copy the URL to the syndication feed with your video sitemap to your clipboard. You can do this by selecting the URL directly or pressing the 'Copy to Clipboard' icon:

Please note that you can also paste the URL of the feed into your browser. Your browser should display the XML feed as follows:

A video sitemap can contains the following:

• The title
• A meta description 
• Video duration
• Thumbnail URL
• Play page URL
• Video publication date
• Categories
• Tags
• Etc.

Step 3: Publish your video sitemap to Google 

Sign into Google Webmaster Tools and add it to your account. 

Go to the tab ‘Sitemaps’ in the left menu and publish the new sitemap by adding the URL to the sitemap in Google Search Console. 

Further Reading: 

If you want to learn more about the structure of a video sitemap with a clear example of all the video tags you can include in your XML video sitemap, visit the Google Search Central site for more information: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/sitemaps/video-sitemaps