Google Video Sitemaps are helpful to make video URLs searchable on Google Video. This article explains Google Sitemaps in brief and lists a few guidelines to help to generate and submit Video Sitemaps.

The Video Sitemap is an extension of the Google sitemap protocol that ties together your video content and the metadata required to get it noticed. The Video Sitemap tells Google exactly where and what the video content is on your site. This will help it get picked up by the Google bots and be fully searchable on Google Video.

A Video Sitemap is simply a text file that utilizes the sitemap protocol with video specific tags in it. In its smallest form it would just be a tag that links to the landing page for the video.

Points to remember while creating Video Sitemap:

• A Video Sitemap should contain only URLs that refer to video content. Video content includes web pages which embed video, URLs to players for video, or the URLs of raw video content hosted on your site.
• Each Sitemap file that you provide must have no more than 50,000 video items and must be no larger than 10MB uncompressed. An individual video file or thumbnail (specified in the <video:content_loc> and <video:thumbnail_loc> tags, respectively) can be no larger than 30MB. If you have more than 50,000 videos, you can submit multiple Sitemaps and a Sitemap index file.
• Google can crawl the following video file types: .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv. All files must be accessible via HTTP.
• The URLs in the Sitemap must have their robots.txt file set appropriately for User-agent “Googlebot”.

You can use tags to:

• State the location of the landing page.
• State the video url.
• Point to a video player (if necessary).
• Point to a thumbnail for the video.
• Give title to the video.
• Give brief description about the video.
• State the duration of the video.

Submitting the Video Sitemap:

• Log into Google webmaster tools.
• Select ‘Video Sitemap’.
• Put in the URL of your Video Sitemap.
• Click ‘Add Video Sitemap’.
• Wait for the ‘Pending’ status to change to ‘OK’.

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