In a recent WebProNews video Matt Cutts hinted that having a video sitemap is very beneficial for a website, which is very true, just like in case of any other sitemap type. This caused some confusion for some webmasters however as it was understood that having a video sitemap may directly increase a “site’s rank” or a video sitemap may add more weight to the site. This is not the case in my opinion; Matt’s statement is rather in direct connection with Universal Search. But let’s see why.
Consider that a user commits a search on Google for [ oil spill ]. The results they will see will be very rich, will include oneboxes including news results, images and videos as well. That’s the aim of universal search, to bring rich content in front of the user, to widen their prospective.
A sample Universal Search results page for the keyphrase "oil spill"
Now if we try to search for something else, let’s say [ bachelor of science ] we can see that there are no oneboxes and this is caused by the fact that there is no content in the additional indexes which is perfectly related to our search query.
With this in mind, in theory somebody could create a web page which is related the the [ bachelor of science ] key-phrase, have in the page body images which are properly labeled with relevant microdata and have in the page a video which is very related to our search query. To help Google find our video, read, to make sure it finds it, we submit a video sitemap and an image sitemap along with our normal web sitemap.
Universal Search results page for the term "bachelor of science"
So, why would be beneficial for a publisher to have oneboxes containing their images and videos on a search result page? Quite simple: most of the oneboxes are above the fold, that is someone could potentially rank below the top result with a video or with an image, if their content is included in in a onebox.
In the case of videos, another huge benefit is that the video may be potentially used by Google TV, but that’s a different subject for another day…