In a recent blog update from Vimeo they announced 3 new features. The most interesting was the “Custom URL’s for your videos” in an effort to help make their videos have a more descriptive URL.

Fantastic! Another place to add a few more relevant and descriptive keywords to help videos rank better in universal/blended search results, until I read

One last note: this is only a redirect for now. That means it’s purely aesthetic (no SEO value) and you will always be end up at the “numbered” version of the video page.

B*ll*cks

They did say “for now”. For now doesn’t mean never, its just a not yet. So it could be something very useful SEO in the future, and I really hope they do switch it so the descriptive URL is the actual URL for the video and no numbers, but we will see.

Also it will be interesting to see if YouTube have any sort of response to this, after all Vimeo was first to provide HD video to which YouTube had to catch up, will we see custom URL’s in YouTube at some point? It would be a great feature to further optimise videos on Vimeo/YouTube alongside titles, descriptions and tags.

But with the “great feature” would come potential spam problems, although is this really any different to spam titles on Vimeo/YouTube already? It could be custom URL’s is something you earn, like longer video lengths from YouTube or part of a paid for feature to potentially keep the spammers at bay.