Add Vimeo Hosted Videos to Your Video Sitemap

If you have videos hosted over on Vimeo and have tried adding these to your video sitemap and submitting that sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools you may have ran into a problem where the video URL you are trying to add is blocked by robots.txt. Fortunately, this is easily resolved.

Error Messages

You will usually get an error message along the lines of the following:

Url Blocked by Robots.txt
sitemap contains URLs which are blocked by robots.txt

A Quick & Easy Fix

The fix for this is quick and simple (for a change) and you just need to update the paths you use to point to the video file.

The standard link you will have will be something like:
http://player.vimeo.com/video/12345678

You want  to change these so they look like this:
http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1245678

So, you should end up with your video:player_location tag looking something like this:

<video:player_loc allow_embed="yes">http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=VIDEO_ID</video:player_loc>

To state the obvious, just in case, obviously, you should replace the VIDEO_ID value with the numeric ID of your video. Obvious right but just in case. 

Why this happens

Ahh, the inquisitive type, congratulations, you are part of the 1% that reads past the quick fix and wants to know why you can’t add the Vimeo Videos to the video sitemap in the first place.

RTFEM – Read The F***ing Error Message

As is often the case, any kind of computing error message is supplied with some signalling that turns of the brains of around 90% of people and if we can dig past the harsh, cryptic exterior of the message and this obvious mental trickery we can get to the heart of the problem.

Url Blocked by Robots.txt

This is exactly what it says on the tin. The URL you are trying to submit is blocked by the Robots.txt file. The URL is not on your site so the URL on the player.vimeo.com domain must have a rule preventing access to search engine spiders.

Sitemap contains URLs which are blocked by robots.txt

This is more of the same and again points us to the robots.txt file on the player.vimeo.com site. So, if we take a look at the robots.txt on the domain for the original link:

http://player.vimeo.com/robots.txt

Then, you can see it has a brief and comprehensive go away to all and sundry:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

If we look a the robots.txt file on the alternative address we can see there are no such restrictions:
http://vimeo.com/robots.txt

So, with our entry unbarred, our friendly neighbourhood web spiders from Google, Bing etc can crawl and index the URL happily.

That’s a wrap!

If you have got any video indexing questions then drop a comment below or give me a shout on Twitter and please remember to be sociable and share this on your favourite social network via the sharing icons below. 🙂