You can now automatically generate video sitemaps for your Mediavine videos!
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The Google Video Sitemap is an extension of the regular sitemap protocol. It allows you to provide a listing of pages on your site containing videos and meta information about them.

Remember, video is difficult to parse.

All players are different, ads often run as pre-roll before the content, and in general, video is more expensive for a computer to process than text or images.

A Google Video Sitemap allows you to show the search engine exactly what page a video appears on, along with the original video file (so they don’t need to access it via the Mediavine Video Player), its length, a thumbnail, its publication timestamp and other relevant information.

Easy. We do it for you!

Mediavine takes the video details you provide us in your Dashboard, and the information we know about the video, and automatically generates a Google Video Sitemap for you.

All you have to do is make sure the permalink field is filled out and properly pointing to the URL containing the video, and we do the rest.

We even host the sitemap file. To see where the video sitemap is hosted, go to Settings > Video and scroll all the way down to the bottom.

Now, for how you get that sitemap to Google …

You can only submit local URLs to Google Search Console, so you’ll need to set up a redirect from your website to our hosted version of your Google Video Sitemap.

The redirect allows you to submit to Google, at which point Google will follow that redirect and use the sitemap hosted by Google. (Yes, this works.)

Log into your WordPress Admin, navigate to your Mediavine Control Panel settings, and check "Enable Video Sitemap":

Once checked, scroll to the bottom of your settings and click Save Changes. Then clear your site caching if you have any caching plugins installed.

If you’re not running MCP or WordPress, ask your provider how to set up the redirect. Alternatively, you can download and host the file yourself, although you would also be responsible for updating it every time you upload or change a video in that case.

In Google Search Console, under Index > Sitemaps, there’s a spot at the top of the page to “Add a new sitemap.” It will automatically fill out the base of your URL, so you simply enter “mv-video-sitemap” or the location of your redirect or manually hosted file if you aren’t using MCP.

Then click Submit. You’re done.

Yes, it was that easy. Now Google will come back each day to download your sitemap that we automatically update for you!

We get it. Nobody’s perfect. If you have non-Mediavine videos, you can simply generate additional Google Video Sitemaps on your own and host them yourself.

You can submit multiple sitemaps, including video ones, to Google without issue.

However, those videos will NOT be included in the sitemaps Mediavine generates. These are just for videos uploaded through the Mediavine Dashboard.

It’s considered best practice by Google to submit a sitemap, and we always recommend following Google’s advice, so we’re going to say yes.

Mediavine publishers can now submit them with virtually no effort, so we encourage it.

We’ve discussed the Mediavine Video Player’s SEO strength at length; videos uploaded through the player have already become eligible for video-specific features in Google Search.

Just think of sitemaps as making your video process even more SEO friendly now. Give Google everything they could ever want and a little bit more.