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"robots.txt" file on your servers is now blocking google SEO

Hi;
I am using video sitemaps along with schema for my website SEO. The video sitemap in xml contains entries for both videos and thumbnails in the form:

"http://content.jwplatform.com/videos/xxxxxxxx-yyyyyyyy.mp4" OR "http://content.jwplatform.com/videos/xxxxxxxx-yyyyyyyy.jpg" (where xxxxxxxx is media-id and yyyyyyyyy is template-id)

Since past week Google Webmaster tools is reporting that these links are BLOCKED BY ROBOTS.TXT on JW Server and therefore these videos and thumbnails are not INDEXED by the Google search (as the crawler is not able to crawl them).

Hence, my videos are no longer listed on Google search queries. Please attend to this serious problem ASAP or suggest an alternative.

Thanks.


3 Community Answers

Donni

Best Answer  JW Player Support Agent  

We started blocking /manifests and /videos in early Nov to prevent our JW Platform URLs from appearing in Google search results. This means that Google is no longer allowed to crawl that actual videos or manifests.

Our product manager said that there is little SEO value in the MP4 URL itself. I am certainly not an expert, but my understanding is that you can use the schema.org syntax on your page to increase the SEO of your videos.

Our product manager also said that a customizable robots.txt for masked domains sounds like an interesting idea. He said he will add this to roadmap for 2017.

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Donni

Best Answer  JW Player Support Agent  
-1 rated :

We started blocking /manifests and /videos in early Nov to prevent our JW Platform URLs from appearing in Google search results. This means that Google is no longer allowed to crawl that actual videos or manifests.

Our product manager said that there is little SEO value in the MP4 URL itself. I am certainly not an expert, but my understanding is that you can use the schema.org syntax on your page to increase the SEO of your videos.

Our product manager also said that a customizable robots.txt for masked domains sounds like an interesting idea. He said he will add this to roadmap for 2017.

Up Down

s...

User  
0 rated :

Thanks and sorry for late reply.

Yep, there is is little SEO value in the MP4 URL itself because it is in the form "xxxxxxxx is media-id and yyyyyyyyy is template-id".

Nevertheless, for SEO, schema alone is not complete without video sitemap. I can understand if this was done to reduce traffic or server load (bleak reason) otherwise it is something very unnecessary (may be that I am not aware of any reason).

Video sitemap helps in listing videos quickly and is great tool when the content is updated on regular basis and schema helps to display the updated content in delightful details.

Thanks.

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s...

User  
0 rated :

Would like to elaborate further:

1) I am not talking about webpage SEO , in fact I am talking about video SEO (most of the search engines have dedicated video search tab).

2) Regardless of schema or sitemap, the video content will not be indexed by google (video), if video/thumbnail URL will be blocked by robots.txt (because google BOT will not be able to crawl the content).

For e.g. ( schema implementation: itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoObject")

Schema declaration "<meta itemprop="contentURL" content="//content.jwplatform.com/videos/xxxxxxxx-yyyyyyyy.mp4" />" and "<meta itemprop="thumbnailURL" content="http://assets-jpcust.jwpsrv.com/thumbs/xxxxxxxx-yyyy.jpg" />" will not be crawled by the BOT hence any video content updated AFTER early NOVEMBER will not be indexed by google.

3) There will be tremendous drop in the traffic of websites completely relying on video SEO (thank god, our current project is just for analysis/research). I hope this step taken by Jwplayer is not valid for all accounts, otherwise there will be huge impact on high traffic commercial websites using paid or corporate accounts....their SEO managers will be on the edge of their seats.

4) All the efforts (coding and keywords research) to list videos on search engines are now futile. It is like our content (videos) will not be listed because the platform-Jwplayer (we selected to upload to) has decided to blocked it.

I hope, I am able to convey this serious issue.

Thanks.

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