SEO Page Content: Better All At Once Or Over Time?

[seanyg]

Hey Google gurus, :)

I run a blog where I post video interviews with experts from my industry. I then get a text transcript of the video created and I post it under the video. This is great unique content for the search engines.

So far I've been getting the videos live on my blog asap and then posting the text transcript a few days later. The initial pages (just video, not much text) don't have much text content until I post the text transcript a few days after the later (after the page has been indexed by Google).

Would it be better to wait to get the transcript back and post the video clip with the transcript all at once?

Thanks for your time and your advice,

~Sean

[tedster]

I'd say it's going to depend on your crawl frequency. Assuming that an initial video-only post still has at least some text content to give Google a clue, then here's the trade-off:

1. Get the video indexed earlier - hopefully beat any scrapers, etc to the first indexing.

2. Get the video and content indexed more completely - pick up better search traffic.

If your crawl frequency is not good, then going with #2 would probably be my choice. If you have good crawl frequency (especially re-crawling already indexed URLs) then you might do better with #1.

I don't think there's any hard and fast rule here. It's probably worth your while to test both approaches and see what the results look like.

[seanyg]

Thanks Tedster. The site is relatively new so it sounds like #2 is better.

I appreciate the reply!

[peteyoung]

Hi Sean

From my experience going I would probably put the videos and transcripts live together for one reason - user behaviour. From my experience most users will consume a video once - unless its very good - and to that effect maximising that experience would come first in my list of priorities before anything else.

As Tedster suggests getting the video live (and first) is essential with a lot of video optimisation - particularly if yuo utilise something like Youtube for hosting.

Can't go against Tedsters logic above - just thought I would include my thoughts on the above.

[Robert Charlton]

Assuming these are videos that you create, then you should be able to delay posting them until you also have transcripts. That way you can post both video and transcript together, and have no problems with someone else posting the videos before you do.

If you're, say, one of several bloggers that have all interviewed the same speaker at an event or product announcement, all about the same breaking news, then you are in a race to post early. But here, then, you've become a news organization and you need to speed up your transcription process.

If you're embedding videos created by others that have already been posted elsewhere, then I think the approach is questionable unless you add substantial original comment with your first post. In this situation, though, "rights to transcribe" someone else's video could become a contentious issue.