JWplayer with tag for SEO

Question

Is there a good way of using JWplayer to instantiate a video tag in stead of a plain div?

Here's a support thread (https://support.jwplayer.com/customer/portal/questions/6062676-jw-player-not-working-with-video-tag), but basically JW admin comes back and tells the OP to not use a video tag at all.

This is the example markup from JW:

<div id="myDiv">This text will be replaced with a player.</div>
<script>
jwplayer("myDiv").setup({
    "file": "http://example.com/myVideo.mp4",
    "image": "http://example.com/myImage.png",
    "height": 360,
    "width": 640
});
</script>

SEO wise, this is utterly useless, the video won't get crawled if it's only instantiated into a plain div by JavaScript after page load.

What I want to do is to have a proper video tag on the page and then instantiate a JW player instance from it. This way the video tag is visible to crawlers without it having to execute JS (which not all do)

Answer 1

The JW Team removed the "support" for embedding over the <video> tag in the upgrade from JW5 to JW6, primarily because they were experiencing too many support issues with embeds failing as a result of conflicts between the initial <video> tag loading and what their code was trying to do.

I wrote an article in 2012 which explains the problem they were faced with: http://powered-by-haiku.co.uk/?p=1

Rather than fix it, they decided to go with the current embed into <div> solution.

Now, you can still technically embed over a <video> tag with JW6 and JW7 - you just need to ensure the "preload" attribute is set to "none" in the original tag, and that this video is also not set to autostart.

However, in terms of SEO using the current JW approach, there is still a way to allow search engines to index and show your videos in search - actually the biggest issue with the move away from embedding over native <video> tags is to do with accessibility - not SEO.

Check out https://developers.google.com/webmasters/videosearch/schema#adding-videoobject-to-a-video-page for details of how to add schema.org markup to your page to support video tagging.

Ideally, in time, JW will allow a built-in means to progressively enhance this Schema.org metadata and build a JW config object dynamically (like they used to do with the video tag) - as it stands however, you'd either need to do that yourself or duplicate the associated information.

Either way, the accessibility issue still exists!