Thursday, December 23, 2010
What are the benefits of submitting feeds like
Video Sitemaps and
mRSS
vs. the benefits of
Facebook Share and RDFa?
Is one better than the other? Let’s start the discussion.
Functionality of feeds vs. on-page markup
Google accepts information from both video feeds, such as Video Sitemaps and mRSS, as well as
on-page markup, such as Facebook Share and RDFa. We recommend that you use both!
If you have limited resources, however, here’s a chart explaining the pros and cons of each
method. The key differentiators include:
- While both feeds and on-page markup give search engines metadata, Video Sitemaps/mRSS also help
with crawl discovery. We may find a new URL through your feed that we wouldn’t have easily
discovered otherwise. - Using Video Sitemaps/mRSS requires that the search engine support these formats and not all
engines do. Because on-page markup is just that—on the page—crawlers can gather the
metadata through organic means as they index the URL. No feed support is required.
| Feeds (Video Sitemaps and mRSS) | On-page markup (Facebook Share and RDFa) | |
| Accepted by Google | ✓ | ✓ |
| Helps search engines discover new URLs with videos (improves discovery and coverage) | ✓ | |
| Provides structured metadata (for example, video title and description) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Allows search engines without sitemap/mRSS support to still obtain metadata information (allows organic gathering of metadata) | ✓ | |
| Incorporates additional metadata like “duration” | ✓ |
If you’re further wondering about the benefits of specific feeds (Video Sitemaps vs. mRSS), we can
help with clarification there, too. First of all, you can use either. We’re indifferent about it.
🙂 One benefit of Video Sitemaps is that, because it’s a format we’re
actively enhancing, we can quickly extend it to allow for more specifications.
All this said, if you’re going to start from scratch, Video Sitemaps is our recommended start.
| Video Sitemaps | mRSS | |
| Accepted by Google | ✓ | ✓ |
| Been around for a long, long time and pretty widely accepted | ✓ | |
| Extremely quick for Google Video Search team to extend | ✓ |
“Starving” to start conversation about feeds or on-page markup? Join us in the
Sitemaps section
of the Webmaster discussion forum.
How we apply this
Google announcements age. We keep this post here for the record, and we note for clients whether the behaviour it describes still applies today or has since been superseded.
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