Google recently announced in its webmaster tools blog, that they are extending the sitemaps protocol to include Video. Now I say extending, what I actually mean is that you can upload a second sitemap containing information about the locations of Video on your website.

At the moment, the only ways to get your videos appearing directly in search results pages is to have them listed on one of a number of sites like YouTube, Metacafe, Google Video, MySpace etc, and this sitemap protocol is likely to be the first stage of indexing videos directly from sites rather than social media sites or other aggregators.

I suspect that it will still be some time before video from a site begins to appear in video search results, and probably even longer (if at all) until it starts to appear in the main index in the Universal Search way (see below):

(p.s. that Zero 7 Video is really good, but anyway, I digress...) 

The blog making this announcement also says that you can set Meta data for the video in the sitemap itself. Now this is why I think it might be a long time before video's from normal sites may not be indexed as we would expect for a while yet. This setting of tags and Meta data is one of the few methods that you can use to attribute words to a video, but like alt tags for images in the past this is really open to spamming.

One advantage of the current system for Google, is that this spamming issue is in many ways circumvented because of the quality control aspects involved with the social media and aggregator sites. Ok, the quality control elements are not that strong, there are plenty of examples of that, and lots of copyrighted material can end up on these sites, but items that are flagrantly abusing guidelines and are seen by the public can be flagged for moderation, and many of these sites require the video is moderated prior to being available publicly.

At the moment, there is no easy way for a similar system to be used on a standard site, as 100 different sites might have 100 different methods of displaying that video on the site. And, although the tags might be different on all these 100 videos, it is just as possible that the same video is being used in each instance, and there is no real way for the search engine to know that these are all the same.

This duplicated content issue is another reason why I think that it may be some time until Google begins listing videos in their index from sites. Firstly, how does it identify if a video on one site is the same as on another site? If the tags are the same or similar, it may be an indication that the content is the same, but the search engine can't watch the video and actually find out if that is the case.

At the moment, and for the foreseeable future, the best way to get a video listed in Google's index as pictured above will continue to be submitting it to the various social media and aggregator sites. It will be interesting to see how the search engines adapt to the difficulties that they face with video indexing, and the new Google sitemap protocol is the first of many small steps that are leading to this happening.

It also seems that a number of people are questioning the wisdom of using a second sitemap for this and are asking why they can't manipulate elements within a normal sitemap and include the video listings here. I suspect that there will be changes in the future to account for this, but I guess we will have to wait and see.

Oh - and in case I don't have a chance to write another blog in the last few days before it, Merry Christmas all readers!!!