Create a video sitemap

Step-by-step Playbooks
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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.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T16:20:17Z