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 & mRSS) |
On-page markup (Facebook Share & RDFa) |
|
| Accepted by Google | ⎷ | ⎷ |
| Helps search engines discover new URLs with videos (improves discovery and coverage) | ⎷ | |
| Provides structured metadata (e.g. 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 agnostic. :) 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 | ⎷ |
