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GUS and Video Files

Jay

We’ve been pretty excited about Google’s new Universal Search (GUS). This integration of multimedia listings into their typical text based results is giving a more rich media interface for searchers. Of course, it also has SEO experts scrambling to try to figure out how to best take advantage of this opportunity.

One of the questions we were asking here was does the video file have to be on YouTube or another video search engine – or will a video resident on a website, assuming it’s been properly tagged and named, appear in a GUS result?

Well, we got our answer the other day via Matt Cutts’ blog. In reporting on highlights of questions from SES, Matt noted one question directed at the Google rep was. “Do you expect to be crawling the web for videos?” The reply was, “Not right now. For the time being, you could submit your video to YouTube or other search engines if you wanted to.”

Of course, we don’t believe this means you shouldn’t properly tag and name your videos when resident on your site. Perhaps at some point in the future, the engines WILL spider sites for multimedia content more robustly. But, for now, it’s all about YouTube, Google Video and other video search engines.