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Do YouTube videos in iFrames get crawled?
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There seems to be quite a few articles out there that say iframes cause problems with organic search and that the various bots can't/won't crawl them. Most of the articles are a few years old (including Moz's video sitemap article). I'm wondering if this is still the case with YouTube/Vimeo/etc videos, all of which only offer iFrames as an embed option.
I have a hard time believing that a Google property (YT) would offer an embed option that it's own bot couldn't crawl. However, let me know if that is in fact the case.
Thanks!
Jim
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Hi Joricia,
What do you use for transcribing? I've tried Dragon but it's video transcription function is useless. Don't really have the money to get everything manually transcribed.
Thanks,
Jim
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If you do not want to take the gamble with I-frames and want to be certain that your content is found by Google I would use Wistia it comes with everything that you need in order to have a video indexed the proper embed code, video site map and schema you can use third-party companies like "speechpad" to transcribe what is being spoken. Wistia also offers A similar service.
If you do choose to use YouTube I would reembed the video with embedly rember you will have to create your own video XML sitemap, add your own schema you may use to YouTube content to a website without having to worry about Google not being able to index because the I-frame is converted into a readable code.
This is a great resource on video SEO. Because I can tell you using Frist hand by using this method it will work.
https://www.distilled.net/blog/video/video-seo-tactics-to-get-ranked/
Sorry I did not explain more in my first response.
Tom
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They all sort of help, but basically just reconfirms what's out there... nobody seems to know for sure. It seems iframes sometimes get crawled but sometimes not. For Mobile, Google recommends iframes but doesn't say specifically that they get crawled and then elsewhere they say there's limited support for them.
It's frustrating Google can't just provide clear guidance on the subject.
While the answer might be Vzaar or Wistia, they have drawbacks and there are times where YouTube is the better choice even if you use one of the other services. So understanding the best way to embed them seems important.
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Hi Jim!
Do any of these responses help?
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Google actually can crawl iframes, but the support is limited. Try indexing it with robots.txt or add the URL of the frame you'd like to have crawled in Google Webmaster Tools. Since an iframe is basically an HTML document inside an HTML document, it's not going to crawl the whole page together with the iframe, making its SEO value lower than if it were outside the iframe. A good tactic is to also have content surrounding the iframe on page that describes what is inside the iframe.
And since we're on the topic of videos inside iframes, make sure you have transcripts for it. Google does use those as well as deaf users, so you're doing a good turn for your client and for those with disabilities.
But to answer the root of your question, you're right we don't actually know if Google has a system setup to specifically make it easier to crawl Youtube videos inside iframes. As transparent as Google has been this past year they're still pretty mysterious overall.
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iframes do not get crawled but there are other ways or Google to see videos that link back to your site Moz uses Wistia.com they are spectacular and their embed code and site map make them easily findable
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