Vimeo Video Sitemap (Video hidden on vimeo.com)

Hello Christophe,

adding a checkbox which switched the video sitemap into the mode of operation suitable for your needs is not a problem, however we need to figure it out so that it’s not just another setting out there and it’s really beneficial to a lot of users.

We cannot let FV Player users reveal their private videos to the whole world that way. WordPress has some self-destructing checkboxes in it, such as “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”, but we try to not be like WordPress when it comes to serious stuff like this.

Thanks,
Martin

Hi Christopher,

Thanks for your note.

Google’s demands on information required to index videos are somewhat unreasonable (Google have tightened them up due to spammers submitting huge sitemaps with video promised but no videos there). Each video has to be downloaded and stored by Google individually. If it’s done wrong, all of a site’s videos will be viewable directly on Google and on a specific URL, making it possible for a hacker to guess a site’s video addresses and download and pirate all the content.

After some tests, we’ve determined membership protected pages and their videos are fairly safe as Google won’t be able to index them at all.

What needs to be done to keep other spiders out of a site’s videos is reverse DNS lookup when Google comes calling, i.e. Google’s spiders will be allowed to view and download these files but others won’t. This is fairly challenging and cannot be done at the player level. It would require some custom configuration of both the web server and the cache plugin not to delay page load times substantially.

As membership videos are protected, I can see this as a less important security issues as we first apprehended. We will make advanced site map indexing available sometime in April (we have a very heavy workload). If you’d like to accelerate this work to next week with a development contribution of $100, we’d be happy to oblige you. You would be the first to get the feature and have our personal troubleshooting on your site until it’s working right for you. Of course the commercial value of this much work is more like $500 but as it will make the player better in the long run and your site is an informational one not particularly commercial, I’m able to make you this special offer for accelerated development.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Making the web work for you, Alec

PS. As Martin noted, the issue with the video sitemap no longer working has to do with changes which Vimeo made to their default video formats which made it impossible for Google to determine if the videos are really there.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by Alec Kinnear.

Hello Christophe,

are all your FV Player videos stored in database? I mean if you can see all of them in the wp-admin -> FV Player screen.

The thing is that we can improve the sitemap functionality for Vimeo for these, but having to support the old shortcodes make it really tricky.

I see the video sitemap improvements you have on mind on https://www.enjoy-swimming.com/test-page-foliovision.html – the video names, descriptions and duplicate <url> entries when there are multiple videos.

We could improve that too.

FV Player Schema.org implementation works with contentURL property which is basically the same as video:content_loc. So it requires an actual video file. But we could use the embed URL for the embedUrl property instead. You are right that is just uses the post title and description for these schema.org fields too a you explained on https://www.enjoy-swimming.com/test-page-foliovision.html

I would handle that as a separate issue.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Christophe,

the issue with using https://player.vimeo.com/video/178502339 kind of URLs is that a lot of websites restrict that one from working – they only allow their videos to be accessed from specific domain.

Having all the videos in database makes this easier. But I’m still checking how to harmonize your requirements with what we need for some other websites. We can’t just forget about the websites who use the old shortcodes and no db.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Christophe,

we have worked on this:

1) If there are multiple videos in single post, these video:video tags are wrapped in the single url tag properly.

2) It uses the video title properly.

3) It uses the post meta description for the description field and if there are multiple videos it grabs a sentence from the previous paragraph (if there is any). This is a bit experimental, but it worked fine on our website.

Ideally there would be a SEO description field for each video. We actually did something similar for a Netflix style website recently – the field is called Synopsis and it would suit this purpose perfectly.

4) If the video can’t be linked to as it’s not a simple video file, it uses the player embed code. That way even Vimeo or YouTube videos get on the sitemap with the player_loc pointing to your website.

You can get the new version which we are currently testing here: https://github.com/foliovision/fv-wordpress-flowplayer/archive/11030502-sitemap-embed-codes.zip

You will have to first deactivate and delete the current FV Player plugin you are using. WordPress will warn you that you might loose settings and data, but it’s not the case with our plugin, no settings now videos will be lost. Or you can just replace the plugin files via FTP.

Then just make sure you are not using the “Disable Embed Button” setting, as without enabled embedding it can’t show these Vimeo and YouTube video in the sitemap using player_loc tag.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Christophe,

thank you for your feedback, I’m including the relevant part of that HTML file here:

1) video:description – Ideally, description could be set via a text box in the shortcode editor (or taken from Vimeo)
2) video:publication_date – publication date is the publication date of the post and not of the videos.
3) video:duration – it would be useful to include the duration of a video in the sitemap
4) Sitemap modification date – if an item is modified in the shortcode editor in the FV Player video list page, the sitemap isn’t updated. One has to not forget to rebuild the pages on which the videos appear to have the sitemap be updated
5) All the improvements should be done for Schema.org too

Thanks,
Martin