Most everyone has heard of, used and is comfortable with Google Xml Sitemaps, but very few people have taken advantage of Google Video Sitemaps. Video sitemaps are a great way to get Google to index video content, generate traffic and earn income. The results of a well built sitemap is premium ranking in search results in Google Video Search Results. The advantage is the newness of the video search is that it can accelerate you past the competition and into the 1st page of results.

For for the complete specifications according to Google, including Video Sitemap, News Sitemaps, Mobile Sitemaps, and Geographical Sitemaps. Check out Google Page here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=10079

For the exact sitemap specifications go directly to the source: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php, Now this specification doesn’t include the video format, as this is something particular to Google and not widely supported. It is not recommended to replace your primary sitemap with a video sitemap, but in addition to it.

During my research for this article, I came across this resource: Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0, Basic Guidelines, W3C Recommendation 29 July 2008

Here is an example from a standard web sitemap:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=“http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iphods.com/movie/2/crash-pad-series-episode-17-dylans-solo/</loc>
<lastmod>2009-07-08</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iphods.com/movie/3/traditional-college-punishment-2/</loc>
<lastmod>2009-07-08</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iphods.com/movie/4/rick-savage-slave-training-101-tit-torture-caning/</loc>
<lastmod>2009-07-08</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
……..

This is a single video listing on a Video Sitemap:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=“http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″ xmlns:video=“http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1″><url>
<loc>http://www.iphods.com/movie/524/secretary-thing/</loc>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.iphods.com/videos/a…672bc.m4v</video:content_loc>
<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.iphods.com/clips/thumbs/a…672bc.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
<video:title>Secretary Thing</video:title>
<video:description>2009 AVN Award Nominee for Best Vignette Release Special Note: This Is Movie # 100,000 In Our VOD Library!!!
Patrick Collins proudly presents, It’s A Secretary Thing, a collection of stunning superstars dressed up as seductive secretaries. Watch the curvaceous Shyla Stylez, alongside Jenaveve Jolie, Karlie Montana, Carli Banks, Ashley Blue, Evie Delatosso, and Jamie Lamore. >
</video:description>
<video:rating>2.5</video:rating>
<video:view_count>12</video:view_count>
<video:publication_date>2009-08-13</video:publication_date>
<video:category>Mature Adult</video:category>
<video:family_friendly>No</video:family_friendly>
<video:tag>play</video:tag>
<video:tag>orgasms</video:tag>
<video:tag>porn</video:tag>
<video:tag>female</video:tag>
<video:tag>movies</video:tag>
<video:tag>original</video:tag>
<video:tag>100%</video:tag>
<video:tag>blue</video:tag>
</video:video>
</url>
……..

When creating your Video Sitemap, keep in mind the following:

• A Video Sitemap should contain only URLs that refer to video content. Video content includes web pages which embed video, URLs to players for video, or the URLs of raw video content hosted on your site. If Google cannot discover video content at the URLs you provide, those records will be ignored by Googlebot.
• Since each video is uniquely identified by its content URL (the location of the actual video file) or, if a content URL is not present, a player URL (a URL pointing to a player for the video), you must include either the <video:player_loc> or <video:content_loc> tags. If these tags are omitted and we can’t find this information, we’ll be unable to index your video.
• Each Sitemap file that you provide must have no more than 10,000 video items and must be no larger than 10MB uncompressed. An individual video file or thumbnail (specified in the <video:content_loc> and <video:thumbnail_loc> tags, respectively) can be no larger than 30MB. If you have more than 10,000 videos, you can submit multiple Sitemaps and a Sitemap index file.
• Google can crawl the following video file types: .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv. All files must be accessible via HTTP. Metafiles that require a download of the source via streaming protocols are not supported.
• The URLs included in the Sitemap must have their robots.txt file set appropriately for User-agent “Googlebot”.
• If you have multiple videos embedded on the same html page, use separate <video:video> entries for them with different <video:player_loc> or <video:content_loc> information.
• Google web crawlers will verify that the information you include in the <video:title> and <video:description> fields matches your live site. You should view your play pages in a browser such as Lynx to make sure Googlebot will be able to find them.

You very quickly noticed how easy it to make these complete sitemaps. Here is an example of how powerful the http://videos.google.com/ can be, look at how well it display the thumbnail videos provided in the sitemap:

Videos.Google.com Search

If you want to watch a fun video on Google, check out this video on Hulu: http://www.hulu.com/watch/116372/cnbc-originals-inside-the-mind-of-google