Google Video vs. Bing Video: How Does Each Search Engine Rank Videos?

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Google and Bing offer unique methods of video discovery through https://google.com/video and https://bing.com/videos or However, the ways in which videos are discovered, classified, and presented vary greatly. In this post, we’ll break down the ways in which the two platforms differ. We will discuss what you need to do to ensure that your videos are well optimized for both search engines.

In order for your videos to be indexed by Google and Bing, you generally need to provide the search engines with certain information about your video. These are:

  • Video title
  • Video description
  • The URL of the page where the video is embedded
  • Date of publication
  • Link to video thumbnail image file
  • Video length (duration)
  • The URL of the actual video file or embedded player.

This is basically the same for Google and Bing. However, they do not receive data in the same way.

Video sitemap

The easiest way to provide a video sitemap? Via a link in the robots.txt file. Alternatively, you can manually submit your sitemap through Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

It’s good to note: Google and Bing will accept an XML video sitemap that includes all of the above information.

Schema.org markup

Instead of a video sitemap, you can provide the same metadata about the video via the schema.org tag. This can be via microdata within the HTML body of any given page or via JSON-LD in the page header.

Using schema.org is by far the easiest and cleanest way to deliver video metadata. This is because it only involves supplementing the existing embedded video with further information, rather than entering the relevant information into a completely new web asset. However, only Google currently reliably uses this method to discover and index video content via Googlebot Video.

Bing currently does not have a separate robot for crawling and discovering video content, so this method unfortunately does not work for Bing.

The Yoast Video SEO plugin automates video sitemaps and Schema.org markup for videos. Which solves the indexing problem for both Google and Bing.

As an alternative or addition to the video sitemap, Bing lets you provide mRSS feed. An mRSS feed specifies all the necessary video data for your video to be indexed by Bing Video. You have two options: full feed or incremental feed. The entire feed will give Bing an overview of all the video content you want to index. An incremental feed, on the other hand, indicates when aspects of the video data have changed or been updated; for example, another thumbnail.

What about YouTube content?

Both Google and Bing treat YouTube videos differently than videos from other sites. Google owns YouTube and (we assume) they have some kind of feed that automatically rates and indexes all publicly available YouTube videos in Google search. As for Bing, they specifically crawl YouTube and index all YouTube content to pull into Bing Video. As mentioned earlier, other sites generally need to provide a sitemap or mRSS feed in order for Bing to index their videos.

Google also offers a more nuanced way of ranking than Bing. They can determine when a YouTube video is embedded on a specific page and then decide whether to list a version of the video on youtube.com or another site. Google chooses this based on which result seems more appropriate and credible for any given query.

On the other hand, Bing always ranks YouTube videos according to youtube.com. So, even though Google owns YouTube, Bing has the vast majority of YouTube videos on its platform.

Google and Bing have very different approaches to video search. Searching for videos on Google works much like a regular “universal” search. Which means users are presented with a vertical list of blue links, usually accompanied by a thumbnail and description.

Google Video Search Ranking

On Bing, videos are presented as a grid with no clear hierarchy.

Bing Video search ranking

Another difference: Google video search results always take you away from Google. You will be redirected to websites such as youtube.com or vimeo.com, or a page on another website with an embedded video.

But when you click on a Bing result, the video panel opens and gives you the option to watch the video in Bing itself. This is apparently done to ensure that Bing keeps most of its traffic within its own system, rather than sending most of it to its biggest competitor.

A YouTube video that plays from Bing Videos

In addition, the user experience of Bing video search is quite good. Most importantly, it has no ads displayed (unlike YouTube).

Above the video player is a list of related keywords to help users discover new videos. Below the video player, you can find a selection of similar videos that users can watch instead. To that extent, the Bing video search experience is much more like Google Image Search than Google Video Search.

And finally, Bing gets the timestamp information directly from YouTube. This creates a chapter splitting feature in the video player for all videos that have timestamps (ie key moments) specified.

YouTube video in Bing presented by chapters

Video results are well integrated into Google’s universal (web) results. For queries where the search engine finds videos particularly relevant, you’ll find them featured in various SERP features and rich results. This includes “Key Moments” links that are directly linked to a specific timestamp in the video.

A variety of different video presentations in Google Universal Search

Please note: The results specified for a video package in Google’s Universal Results often do not exactly match the results as listed on the video search tabs.

Typically, universal results will show more results from YouTube, while video-specific search results will show a much wider selection of sources. This may be because rankings for the two different types of searches are treated very differently and by different algorithms.

Bing also includes videos in its universal search results. However, they have a much more limited selection of options – just a horizontal slider where each link takes you to a video within the Bing Video infrastructure rather than a specific website.

Bing Universal Search only includes a carousel of videos that link to Bing Videos

In conclusion

Both Google and Bing can be very useful tools for video distribution. Just remember to use different strategies for them, because the way videos are discovered and ranked is also different. And if you use Yoast Video SEO for WordPress plugin, you can easily ensure that you will be able to rank and increase traffic views from both. how Because the plugin automates the technical SEO of your video, which will greatly improve its performance and searchability!

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