Video SEO plugin FAQ

If you’re using a custom field, which is any field to implement your video that’s not the standard content section, you need to define your custom field in the Video SEO plugin. To find out the name of your custom field, just download and install the Custom Field Finder plugin and easily find the custom fields you’re using!

Once you’ve installed the plugin, go to ‘Tools’ > Custom Field Finder and paste the ID of the post or page you want to check the custom fields of in the appropriate field:

This will show you a list of the custom fields you’re using. Find the custom field that has the video URL or ID in it, and copy the key.

Next, you should go to the Video SEO settings and paste your custom field name here:

And, of course, don’t forget to hit Save Settings!

Back To Top

That depends on your license. We have three different licenses with three different ‘clearances’. A Personal license can be used for one website, a Professional license can be used for up to 5 websites. Then there’s the Agency license which can be used for unlimited websites.

If you bought your license before January 7th, 2013, you have an unlimited license.

Back To Top

We can solve that quite easily, enter the email you used to purchase the plugin here and your purchase email will be resent:

Back To Top

You don’t have to do that specifically for the video XML sitemap. It is linked from the Index Sitemap that is generated by the WordPress SEO plugin, which will make Google recognize it automatically. I assume you will have already added that Index sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, if you haven’t, that might be smart to do. Clicking on that will then show you the stats for the individual sitemaps that are contained in it.

Back To Top

Yes, the plugin works with custom fields. You can set the custom fields the plugin has to check for video content. This can be done by going to the SEO tab and clicking Video SEO. Under General Settings you will find a textbox in which you can fill in your custom field names. However, you will have to know the name for the custom field you’re using.

Back To Top

Especially on websites with a large number of videos, the plugin can have problems finding all the videos, due to (a shortage of) memory. You should try re-indexing a number of times, but be sure to leave the ‘Force Re-Index’ box unchecked. Once the number in the sitemap is static, it has found all videos.

Back To Top

There could be several things wrong. First, check whether the source of the sitemap shows you the video data you would expect in an XML video sitemap. If it does, make sure the XSLT file, linked in the very top of the XML file, is available. Sometimes this file gets blocked by .htaccess prevention of the wp-contentdirectory.Another possible issue is that the XML is invalid, if you open the XML sitemap in Firefox, you’ll usually see this as that would display an error. If that’s the case, please email us with a link to the XML sitemap and we’ll try to debug and fix the issue.

Back To Top

This can occur when you’re running W3 Total Cache and you’ve ticked the setting to hide the sitemap from normal visitors. What W3TC does is cache the error which normal visitors get, if they want to view the video XML sitemap. This error is then also served to googlebot, because the logic to show the sitemap to googlebot won’t execute.The best way to fix this is to create an extra user agent group. You can create this user agent group by going to the W3TC’s settings. Under Performance and then User Agent Groups there’s a button “Create a group”. Click this button and call your group “Google” or “Googlebot” and then in the user agents field you just enter “googlebot”. This will force W3 Total Cache to make a separate cache for Googlebot user-agents. Another option is to prevent W3TC from caching video-sitemap.xml entirely, but since that’s slower, we actually prefer the user-agent group.

Back To Top

The short answer: no. I would prefer Wistia, Vimeo, Blip or Dailymotion. While YouTube works at the moment, it might break if Google decides they want to send the traffic to YouTube instead of your site. Thus we would advise against using it for Video SEO purposes. It is however a great site to get found on as well, so if you’ve got the resources for it, upload it to both YouTube and another video platform of your choice and use that second video platform for embedding on your blog.

Back To Top

It can take more than two weeks for the videos to show up in the Google search results. This depends on how often Google spiders your website. So don’t expect the search results to change in a day, or even a week. Give it some time.

Back To Top

Yes. It can show them both, which will look like this:

Back To Top

To prevent this from happening, you should do the following:

1. Go to WordPress Settings in the backend
2. Go to Permalinks
3. Click Save Changes (without altering anything)

Your video XML sitemap should now work.

Back To Top

The Video SEO plugin only indexes videos on your taxonomy pages that are in the description of that taxonomy. If the videos are in shown as excerpts of underlying pages, it will not index them.

If indexing the videos in descriptions of taxonomy pages is exactly what you want, you should check the taxonomies you want indexed by ticking these taxonomies under ‘Taxonomies to include in XML Video Sitemap’.

Back To Top

Yes, you can! There’s no “official” upgrade process right now, but just respond to your purchase email and we’ll send you a personal discount code to buy your other license minus the cost of your single license.

Back To Top

That all depends on how many WordPress installs you have.

Do you have 1 domain name? You just need a single license, no matter how many languages you’ve got!

If you have more than one domain name, you’ll need a multi-site license.

Back To Top

First of all, let us be clear that this is not due to our plugin, but due to poorly coded themes and/or plugins.

You should go to your .htaccess file (WordPress SEO plugin > Edit Files) and add the following code before the main WordPress rewrite rules:

Remember that you might have to modify this if you are running WordPress in a subfolder. For instance, if you run it in a subfolder called /wordpress/, this would be the proper code.

Back To Top

These videos are on the bottom of your second sitemap, because that way only the last video sitemap changes and Google only needs to re-fetch that one instead of re-fetching all the video sitemaps all the time. The last update time will tell Google what’s new.

Back To Top