Is It Better To Upload Videos To Your Website Or Embed Them From YouTube?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

A lot of people are uploading videos to their website now. Some, in fact it is likely most, people are uploading videos to YouTube then embedding them on their website or blog. But is this good for SEO?

Well, if you embed a video from another website onto your website then you don’t really get any benefit from that. The video file actually resides on another server and since the search engines don’t crawl those videos you don’t get any on-page contact benefits. Even if you add the proper tags to the video then the benefit will go to the website that has the content on its servers.

For search engine optimization, it is better to actually upload the video to your own website and allow other webmasters to embed the video on their sites from yours. That way you can add the tags to the video code and every time that a search engine crawls that tag you’ll get the benefit plus the back link from the site that embeds the video. The more people who use your video, the more back links you can build. You won’t be building back links from videos you upload to YouTube.

October 16, 2008
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4 Comments
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SEO

4 Responses to “Is It Better To Upload Videos To Your Website Or Embed Them From YouTube?”

Ari Herzog says:

October 17, 2008 at 10:08 am

Neat tip, Nick. Thanks!

Question, though: By embedding a video on your own page, wouldn’t that slow the loading of the page vs an embed to another server?
Nick Stamoulis says:

October 17, 2008 at 10:28 am

Hi Ari, thanks for a great question.

Yes, videos on your own server can slow it down, but if you don’t overload it with too many videos then it shouldn’t matter. The key is to be judicious with the use of your server space. If you upload a lot of videos then you might be better off with YouTube in the long run – unless you have a lot of server space. This is where you as webmaster have to make a value judgment.
michael says:

November 11, 2008 at 2:59 am

I launched my site 2 months ago http://www.website-video.com.au and I had no rankings, 10 days ago I started uploading to youtube and twenty other sites, only 7 give links back. I have shot up to number 7 on google.com.au under website video production, I have not done anything other than upload the videos, can you explain
Nick Stamoulis says:

November 11, 2008 at 6:41 am

Michael,

Can I give you a scientific explaination, no…but, if I had to guess your website will not stay ranking over the next month…if it does then it will be short term for sure. The engines really like video links but I would strongly consider building your relevant links many other ways other than video.

Thanks for reading & good luck with the seo efforts for your site!