Thursday, March 24, 2011
If your website is the authoritative source for the video of a particular TV show, make sure we know about it! Hopefully, you already submit Video Sitemaps or mRSS feeds to inform us about video content on your website. We now support additional fields in both video Sitemaps and mRSS feeds where you can specify metadata specific to television or episodic content. This includes the series' title, the season and episode numbers for the video in question, the premiere date, as well as other additional information. The metadata from your video feed helps us provide more detailed, relevant results to users wanting to view your show.
Here's an example Video Sitemap entry that includes all the required and some optional TV metadata in the
>video:tvshow> element:
<video:video>
<video:title>The Sample Show, Season 1, Episode 2</video:title>
<!-- other required root level video tags omitted -->
<video:tvshow>
<video:show_title>The Sample Show</video:show_title>;
<video:video_type>full</video:video_type>
<video:episode_title>A Sample Episode Title</video:episode_title>
<video:season_number>1</video:season_number>
<video:episode_number>2</video:episode_number>
</video:tvshow>
</video:video>
The full documentation for the tags for both mRSS and Video Sitemaps can be found in our Webmaster Tools Help Center. As always, if you have any questions about Video Sitemaps or mRSS feeds, reach out to us in the Sitemaps section of the Webmaster Help Forum.