Why no video thumbnail?
-
We started using Wistia for our video hosting, and our SERP results for the video pages were showing thumbnails in the results, but somewhere along the line we just stopped getting the thumbnails to show, and I'm not sure why.
Anyone have any ideas?
Search: Edward Asner Interview by Malcolm Hillgartner
We are both Blackstoneaudio.com and Downpour.com, and yes, I know there are issues with posting the content on both sites, more concerned with why the thumbnails disappeared from both sites.
-
Thanks Phil,
That was my guess, I just wanted confirmation, and between you and the folks at Wistia sounds like that's the most plausible explanation.
Thanks everyone for taking the time to help out with this!
-
I'm 90% positive it's because you've hidden the video code itself behind a JavaScript trigger, so Googlebot struggles to see it.
While you used to be able to get videos indexed just with a video sitemap, Google have got slightly better at working out whether that sitemap actually corresponds to content in the HTML, but if you've used JS to execute the embedded video, you're likely to find that it won't get indexed.
So, I'd recommend looking at fixing that implementation and potentially see if you can do it just with CSS, or shift the page around so the embed loads up when the page does, not after a secondary trigger.
-
So, I talked to Wistia and they said there may be an issue with the video not initializing on the page since it is behind a button/tab and not on the page to start with. I was kind of expecting someone to say something about that, but no one did. Is this a problem in anyone's view? The code for the video IS in the page before the button is clicked.
-
Hmm...yeah, it doesn't show up, but it does detect the thumbnail url and I can verify that it works.
-
Google selectively shows rich snippets.
Plug your URL into the Google Structured Data Testing Tool. http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
If it works, stop worrying about your snippet and focus on other areas of your site you can improve.
-
Hmm... interesting, since early January huh? I know someone on our side came around and added the button interface that effectively "hides" the video initially and you have to click the button to actually show the video on the page, so I was wondering if that had anything to do with it (the video is in the code still). This is a possibility I hadn't considered.
I'd still like to hear if anyone has any other thoughts, but thanks for the link to the article, good information to have.
-
I am having issues trying to remove the video snippet, I think it could all be related as I just read this http://searchengineland.com/google-authorship-bug-affects-very-few-sites-actively-working-on-a-fix-167167
Also, it's not guaranteed to show anyway. But if it was showing before I'm not sure why it would just disappear.
I reckon it's something to do with Google in my opinion.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can we compete for both videos and text results?
Hi, We have a ecommerce website that performs very well for our brand pages on the text results including the reviews snippet. Our brand pages also include embedded videos. Until now we have always ranked poorly on video results. Our videos are hosted over youtube. In order to boost our video result we have recently submitted a video sitemap to help crawlers find out our videos. The result is the following : our brand pages are now only competing in the video results space. Instead of showing as a text result with our reviews snippet, it shows as a video in a carrousel widget. Within the video tab we are ranking top. We have experienced a drop in CTR since then. Moz have reported a drop on all our brand keywords for text search although the video widget shows our brand there. Is there a way to compete for both videos results and text results, making the choice to keey the review snippet widget? Is the video sitemap useful only to compete within the video space? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattam1 -
Best tips for getting a video page to rank?
We have a video for our company, located here: http://www.imageworkscreative.com/imageworks-creative-video It's an overview of our company and the services we offer. We'd like to get this page ranking, but we haven't had much luck so far. Our Youtube account does better, but I'm looking for some things we can do on or offsite to get this page to rank. Any tips would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottImageWorks0 -
SEO views on having other videos on our YouTube Channel
Our company is an eCommerce site for aftermarket automotive accessories. We recently started making videos for our customers and hosting them on YouTube channel. With our limited resources, we're unable to produce a video for all our products (videos on benefits and features, installation, new product introductory, reviews, etc.), How does it look if we have other peoples videos on our channel? Will our SEO be affected? Would we be flagged by YouTube?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebRiverGroup0 -
Author Tag - How do you get your Author Thumbnail on more then one site?
Ive managed to set up the Rel:Author tag on my wordpress site, and the thumbnail is now showing in Google search results Each article I write on my blog has a link to me Author page, which has on it a link to my Google Plus page. So this works great. However I write articles for another few websites and would like to get my author thumbnail image showing for them articles too. How do I do this? Do I need an Author page on the other sites also? I dont think I'll be able to get an author page on the other sites, is it not possible to somehow link direct from the article to my G+ page? How would guest articles work too? Any ideas? Thanks in advance guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Embed hosted videos or Youtube videos on site
Youtube is our major source of traffic. We also have many of the same videos on our own site, self-hosted. They use the same video player as our paid video course, which allows the user to increase or decrease speed. We're debating whether to replace these self-hosted videos with youtube embeds. Pros: Increase Youtube viewcounts More engagement with videos (videos suggested at end of youtube videos are almost all our own) Cons Possible outbound traffic to youtube. We can't showcase our video player's speed change function I'm not sure how embed views are taken into account by Youtube, and how big a factor outbound traffic is. Would you suggest swapping out our self-hosted videos for embeds? We want to maintain our Youtube channel's edge, and convince people to sign up for our course.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lighttable0 -
How to get video thumbnails to appear in SERPs
What's the best way to get video thumbs to appear in SERPs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
I have evidence that product videos are hurting our rankings - How do I hide them!?
We normally rank between #1-3 for long-tail product related keywords in our industry. Then we saw our rankings drop when we added product videos to some of our product pages. My hypothesis was that for most ecommerce-related queries, Google has a certain aesthetic that they are going for in the SERP's. They like to show video listings somewhere in the middle of the first page.. not as one of the first 3 results. Product page Product page Google shopping results Product page Video Result on product page Video Result on product page Product page I did an experiment by removing the product videos from a selection of our product pages and as soon as they were reindexed w/o the video we saw an average of a 3 spot jump in rankings! Since the product videos have actually helped on-site conversion rate.. we'd like to keep them on the product pages but hide them from being indexed by Google. Is there a safe way to do this? Is it possible to use an i-frame, or will Google still see the video on the page and index it as such. Thanks for any advice!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebstaurantStore.com0 -
How to get videos to show up on SERPs as your own
If another site hosts the video and you show it on your site in an iframe, would the video show up in SERPs on your URL? I believe it would show up on their URL. Do you need to host the video on your own server in order for it to show up on SERPs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0