Scoring high in search results is critical for businesses. Enough so that many larger companies have SEO (search engine optimization) teams dedicated to ensuring that the algorithms used Google, Bing, and other search engines treat their sites favorably.
To help our customers optimize their SEO within their video strategy, we recently added a couple of features to Gallery Portals that may significantly improve your SEO performance.
rel=canonical
If a site contains multiple pages (URLs) with identical or near-identical content, it will have a negative impact on your SEO.
Unfortunately, this can happen on Gallery sites when a video lives in more than one Category. Many Gallery customers have a “Most Recent” or “Most Popular” category which highlights videos that exist elsewhere on the site. When Google sees these identical pages, it might split the SEO value between them, which dilutes the overall SEO power of that page.
To avoid any negative SEO impact, add a rel=canonical tag. This tells Google that the SEO value of a given page actually belongs to another page that I've identified through a tag within a pages <head> element. It looks like this:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/my_page.html; />
We’ve made this easy for you within Gallery; you can now add rel=canonical to all of your video detail pages by clicking a checkbox in the Discovery > Site Details Screen.
Gallery uses a URL structure for video detail pages with the following portions:
http://your-url.com/detail/videos/category-name/video/video-id/title-of-video.html
An actual URL might look like:
http://example.com/detail/videos/popular-videos/video/3323417749001/my-great-video
The rel=canonical tag removes the category name from the URL, so videos that live in more than one category will point to the same canonical URL.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/detail/video/3323417749001/my-great-video">
Remove Video Titles from URLs
Above you can see we added a new check box that allows the ability to remove the video titles from URLs within Gallery. This may have some SEO benefit for customers who frequently change the names of their videos. It also maybe benefit customers with lengthy titles that can make for unwieldy URLs.
There is a chance that this could have negative SEO consequences for removing video titles for URLs, so you'd only want to implement this if you've fully considered the potential benefit and consequences.
Final Considerations
If you have concerns about either of these features, check with an SEO expert before implementing. If you do implement these features we recommend you review your search engine traffic before the change to get a baseline, and after the change to get a sense of the impact.