How to Earn Link Credit for Video Re-embeds

Time for a fun little announcement! Wistia now supports video backlinks through the embed button in the social bar.

What the what?

A quick rewind! If you’re not deeply involved in the world of SEO, you may be asking yourself what this means. First, a brief definition of “backlink”:

"Backlinks, also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links, are incoming links to a website or web page. Their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO). The number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (for example, this is used by Google to determine the PageRank of a webpage)."

(Cheers to Wikipedia, arbiter of free knowledge. If you want to learn more about SEO and backlinks, we can’t recommend our friends at Distilled and Moz highly enough.)

How backlinking works in Wistia

When someone embeds your video on their site, it’s reasonable to expect that you’d receive credit via a backlink. But historically, that’s been very difficult to achieve with video embeds. We had Phil Nottingham from Distilled weigh in on the state of video backlinks and why this is different:

"The problem with the majority of video embeds is that it’s hard for search engine robots to determine the appropriate ownership of content in relation to specific websites. When you embed a video from YouTube, Vimeo or any paid third-party hosting platform, you’re essentially linking back to the instance of the video on those websites — but not providing SEO value for the original creator of the video through a backlink providing attribution.

“Wistia have now ensured that embed codes provided to users through the ”embed" button provide an attribution link pointing to the instance of the video on your website. In layman’s terms — this now means that whenever someone embeds your Wistia videos on their site — you’re getting SEO value for those embeds."

To set up backlinks for your videos, turn on the Social Bar in the Customize menu. Then, check the “Embed” Button" option and click “Configure.”

Check the box for “Include backlink” and you’re all set - the credit now goes to you, the content creator! By default, the backlink will point to the page where the video gets embedded. You can customize the page that’s credited by changing your selection for “Buttons link to … ” to “A specific page.” Keep in mind this will change that configuration for all of the buttons on the Social Bar.

Once you’ve enabled the backlink, nothing will visibly change on your end or when the video is embedded elsewhere. But behind the scenes, you’ll be receiving the credit for those sweet, sweet backlinks!