search engine submission Archives - Gravity Search Marketing

Major Video Search Engines (and How To Get Into…

September 18, 2007
by Gradiva Couzin

Not sure how to draw people to watch the videos on your website? Here’s our “right now” primer on video search!

There are two broad categories of video search: video sharing sites and video search engines. Generally speaking, video sharing sites allow content owners to upload videos, while video search engines index the videos from the Web, but do not host video content. Some video sites (such as YouTube) display search results only from within their own database, while others (such as Yahoo! Video Search) return results from both their hosted videos and outside websites. Many video search engines send out crawlers to index media content on the web, just like the “regular” search engines do for text content.

Video strategies can be boiled down into two approaches:

uploading video for viewing on video sharing sites
optimizing your video for crawling by video search engines, so that targeted traffic will visit your site to view your video content

Why would you choose one strategy over another? It’s about what you want to gain from your video content. If you care mostly about branding or “buzz”, you probably won’t mind uploading your video for the YouTube masses to see. But if you care more about people viewing ads on your website, it won’t benefit you to have your video viewed outside your site, and you’ll want your videos to be spidered and listed by a video search engine likeBlinkx.

Can you trust the video search engine spiders to find your content? We don’t think so, at least not yet. The good news is, many video search engines also accept RSS feeds from website owners.

Here’s a list of video search sites that you may want to explore for your own website:

Gravity Search Marketing’s Very Useful Video Search Submittal Chart

Name	Spider or Upload?	Accepts RSS Feed?
YouTube	Upload	No
Blinkx	Spider	Yes (submit MRSS)
Google Video	Both	Yes, (Google’s video sitemap instructions)
Yahoo!	Both	Yes (submit MRSS)
AOL Video	Both	Yes (via Truveo)
Microsoft’s Bing Video Search	Spider	Yes (via Truveo)
Altavista	Spider	No (Possibly powered by Yahoo! Video)
Purevideo	Both	Yes
Searchforvideo	Both	Yes
Brightcove	Upload	No
Gofish.com	Upload	No
Vimeo.com	Upload	No
Dabble.com	Spider	No, but can be added manually (login req’d)
Clipblast	Spider	Yes (submit MRSS)
Joost	Neither (Content partnerships only)	No

In our SEO book, we are very clear about the difference between the “right now” of SEO and the “eternal,” or more long-lasting, elements of SEO. Video search definitely belongs in the “right now” category. Video search engines are being bought, sold, launched, and shut down at a dizzying pace. Contact us if you have an updated link for this chart – we’d love to keep it current for our readers!

You might also be interested in learning about video search from the following sources:

Robin Good’s Video Search Mini Guide
Danny Sullivan’s excellent analysis and history of Video Search on Search Engine Land

If you love the Wild West, video search should be a blast for you. Good luck and Enjoy!

ask the experts

Ask the Experts: Should I Auto-submit to Search Engines?

September 6, 2006
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: I once had a program that would submit my website to all search engines. A person warned me about using that kind of program because the search engines will cut you off if you submit too often. Is that true?

A: We don’t have a definite answer about whether autosubmit programs will get you penalized or banned, but we can tell you that we don’t recommend doing it, and we don’t think it’s necessary.

There are only a few unique search engines with a big audience reach, and as you know from our book, those engines are Google (and AOL, which uses Google’s results), Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask. After submitting to the biggies that allow submittals, probably the best thing for you to do is look for niche directories and sites that speak to the same audience as your site, and approach these very targeted websites for a link or listing. This method of link building helps you focus on getting the specific audience you want to your site, and doesn’t waste your time or money on audiences that are too general or too tiny. You can look on our website for a sample link letter. And of course link building is covered in the hour-a-day plan in our book.

Back to your original question, there are differences of opinion about whether oversubmitting can get you penalized by the search engines. But we would guess it can’t, because it would be very easy for someone to attempt to knock their competitors down by oversubmitting competing sites. And we don’t think the search engines would want that to happen.

Major Video Search Engines (and How To Get Into…

Not sure how to draw people to watch the videos on your website? Here’s our “right now” primer on video search!

Gravity Search Marketing’s Very Useful Video Search Submittal Chart

Ask the Experts: Should I Auto-submit to Search Engines?

Q: I once had a program that would submit my website to all search engines. A person warned me about using that kind of program because the search engines will cut you off if you submit too often. Is that true?

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