The Google Webmaster Help Center is an excellent resource to answer all your video sitemap related questions.

Google Video Sitemaps is an extension of the Sitemap protocol that enables you to publish and syndicate online video content and its relevant metadata to Google in order to make it searchable in the Google Video index. You can use a Video Sitemap to add descriptive information " such as a videos title, description, duration, etc. " that makes it easier for users to find a particular piece of content. When a user finds your video through Google, they will be linked to your hosted environments for the full playback.

Google Video's search algorithm is based on the the video file itself and the video metadata in the Sitemap that is associated with each feed. If provided in your Video Sitemap, your video files are downloaded in order to enhance the searchability of the video and to automatically generate a representative thumbnail image for the video if one is not provided.

Things to remember when creating a 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. If Google cannot discover video content at the URLs you provide, those records will be ignored by Googlebot.



• Each video is uniquely identified by its content URL (the location of the actual video file) or, if a content URL is not present, a player URL (a URL pointing to a player for the video).



• Each Sitemap file that you provide must have no more than 50,000 video items and must be no larger than 10MB when compressed. An individual video file or thumbnail (specified in the and 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. Metafiles that require a download of the source via streaming protocols are not supported.



• The URLs included in the Sitemap must have their robots.txt file set appropriately for UserAgent "Googlebot".
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  About the Author:
  Manoj Jasra is an online marketing veteran of almost 10 years who specializes in analytics, social/search strategy and mobile marketing. Manoj is currently a Sr. Strategist at one of Canada's largest Telecommunications Companies, Shaw Communications Inc., where he leads Social Media, SEO, PPC and Web Analytics strategies. Manoj first started in the search marketing industry with Enquiro Search Solutions, where he spearheaded web analytics, SEO Training and the development of cutting edge search marketing solutions for clients.
  
  Manoj is a Professional Speaker having participated at events such as Emetrics, Web Analytics Xchange, WebTrends' Engage, Internet Marketing Conference, Social Media Innovation Summit and Search Engine Strategies. He authors Web Analytics World (a top 100 Online Marketing Blog) and consults through his firm Jasra Inc.

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