Contributors
@brandon-leuangpaseuth @paul-boag
Business Benefits
Make the videos on your website more discoverable.
Create a spreadsheet of all pages and posts with videos on your website that you want people to find via search engines.
Don’t include URLs that are:
- Blocked by robots.txt file.
- Require a login to access.
- Are password-protected.
Paste in the URL of each video and its thumbnail in the columns beside its page or post URL.
If the URLs are blocked from search engines in any way, do not include them.
Open a text editor like Notepad on your computer and create a new file.
Code all the video information in your spreadsheet in XML tags.
Your XML code should look like this for each video:
https://example.com/ulr-of-landing-or-host-page/
https://example.com/url-of-the-thumbnail-of-your-video.jpg
Title of your video
Description of your video
https://example.com/url-of-video.mp4
Link to video player if it’s custom/video:player_loc>
in seconds
2021-11-0ST19:20:30+08:00
4.2
12345
2007-11-05T19:20:30+08:00
yes
IE GB US GA
1.99
yes
no
```- If you have more than 50,000 indexable videos, break down your sitemap into multiple files.
- If your sitemap file size exceeds 50mb, break it down into multiple sitemap files.
## Save the file as `video_sitemap.xml`.
If you have more than one video sitemap, create a sitemap index file called `sitemap_index.xml` and link to all the sitemaps on your website including your video sitemaps. The index file looks like this:
https://example.com/video-sitemap1.xml
https://example.com/video-sitemap2.xml
## Update your sitemap when you publish new videos that you want search engines to index.