Creating a Video Sitemap


A video sitemap is a way of letting search engines know which of your pages contain videos and on which URL you want them to be indexed. The Online Video Platform has an integrated video sitemap generator that delivers standard compliant video sitemap XML. To create a video sitemap follow these steps:

Note:

For the final step you will need to add server-side code to your website. You may need a webmaster for this.

1.0 | Create a Playlist

Open your Media library and navigate to ‘Playlists’ in the left-side menu.  Create a new smart or static playlist. A smart playlist automatically adds new media clips based on the set filters. A static playlist remains the same unless you manually add a new media clip. Read more about playlists here. 

We recommend creating a smart playlist based on the tag ‘sitemap’ and tagging every media clip you would like to add to the playlist with ‘sitemap’.

The playlist you have created will automatically generate a text file (XML) that can be used as a video sitemap.

2.0 | Add the video Sitemap to your website

The playlist now needs to be added to your website. This can be done manually or automatically by adding a piece of server side code to your website.

Note:

When adding playlist manually you will need to update the XML every time you add a new video. We therefore recommend that you add server side code to your website to retrieve the playlist automatically. Please contact your webmaster to write & implement this code.

Information for webmasters:
When /sitemap/{playlist id}.xml is issued, a sitemap containing the latest 10.000 published (and not under embargo) media clips of mediatype video will be output in video sitemap xml format.

 

The request should follow this format:
/sitemap/{playlist id}.xml?[forcePfx]=true&[urlprefix]=&[urlpostfix]=

Required parametersTypeDescription
{playlist id}intThe id of the playlist that is used for the sitemap output
Optional parameters
[forcePfx]stringShould prefix and/or postfix be used for the clip urls
[urlPrefix]stringWill be pasted in front of the id of the clip in the generated url. Should start with a valid protocol identifier.
[urlPostfix]stringWill be pasted after the id of the clip in the generated url.

The URL should contain your publication and the ID of the playlist that functions as your sitemap. This way, the sitemap on your website tells Google the videos are accessible on your own domain instead of the video platform.

Add this new sitemap to Google Search Console. The sitemap ID can be found in the URL of your playlist after /playlist. For example:

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