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Do you have two pages on your site that are practically identical yet necessary in order for your site to work? And do you need one of them to be indexed in Google search? Then you should use the rel=”canonical” tag. It's a useful tool in any SEOs arsenal. But where can you find the tag? It sits in the <head> of the duplicate page, and points to the version you want to be indexed. In other words: It tells Google and other search engine crawlers that this version is the “canonical”.
With video marketing, there are common technical implementations that require specific use of the rel=”canonical” tag. For example, to prevent the indexation of duplicate and low-quality pages. There are also common ways many plugins and tools default to implementing rel=”canonical” that can hamper video SEO.
In this post, we’ll break down the common mistakes typically made with rel=”canonical” for video SEO. And we'll explain how to avoid them!
1: Leaving isolated video hosting pages indexable with self-referencing canonical tags
When self-hosting videos use a custom player and CDN, it’s very common to embed the videos as an encapsulated media file on an otherwise blank page. A video player can then reference the files via iframe or JavaScript. These pages will often live on a subdirectory or subdomain, e.g. videos.example.com/video-5.html. They usually serve no functional purpose for users, except to offer a location from which video players can find and pull in video files.
Because the purpose of these pages is technical and they're often not linked to (beyond instances in the video player code), the pages are true duplicates. Which means it's not appropriate to leave them open to the index. However, the pages do need to be crawlable. Otherwise, Googlebot Video won't be able to find the video files and index the videos.
The best solution is therefore to implement rel=”canonical”. This will make your pages crawlable, while telling Google not to index them. Instead, Google will see them as subsidiary assets for the core page that the videos are presented on. This could mean that you need to adjust default self-referencing rel=”canonical” rules, so these isolated page include self-referencing canonical tags by default.
Solution: Use rel=”canonical” to point isolated video pages to the pages they are primarily embedded on.
2. Implementing canonical tags for the same video on multiple pages
When indexing videos, Google considers a video as a child of a page rather than an individual asset with its own distinct URL, as they do with image files. What does this mean? It means duplication at a video level currently isn't a particular consideration for Googlebot. Even if you include the same video on two pages and implement structured data so Googlebot can find and index the videos, Google doesn’t per se consider them to be the same video.
Note: This doesn’t mean you can publish the same video on as many pages as you like with no consequences. If the pages are otherwise very similar, target similar keywords, and have identical video titles and thumbnails, then this can still create confusion and ranking cannibalization. However, this would be a problem at page level rather than video level.
In the future, there may well emerge a tool to indicate duplication at a media asset level. For now, though, the best solution is to ensure that each page you create contains unique content in addition to any duplicated assets. And trust Google to know which page is most appropriate to rank for any given query.
Solution: Don’t use rel=”canonical”. Just make sure every page has unique copy and other unique media.
What if you need to use the same video multiple times?
For example, if you want to use it on a help page and a blog post. Rest assured, you can still do this without worrying about duplication. However, some people still feel that you should use rel=”canonical” to indicate this duplication. Their reason? The videos are identical, so one of the pages has to be more appropriate than the other to rank. This isn't true, though. Because rel=”canonical” only operates at a page level rather than a media asset level, it would be an incorrect use of the protocol. |
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发表于 2023-11-13 09:36:15
