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 you combine YouTube and on-site hosting as part of a Video SEO strategy?
My question is sparked by how Moz uses its Whiteboard Friday videos. We are currently capturing video stories from our customers. Its excellent and engaging content we'd love to share with a wider audience. I'm puttting together a strategy for video SEO to drive traffic to our site and Moz's approach intrigues me. As we know, the world of video rich snippets changed in 2014 - their appearance in universal search reduced dramatically and what remained was almost entirely (90%+) YouTube snippets. Useless if you're looking to drive traffic to your own site. Of course, it's still possible to earn SERPs for video in Google video search, but I imagine the search volume is greatly reduced. From what I can see, first Moz host their Whiteboard Friday video on Wistia, complete with transcript and whiteboard capture. Suprisingly, I see no Schema markup for video. Can anyone shed a light as to why this might be a good idea? 3-6 months later the same video is then uploaded to youtube, with the same title and a similar description. The end result is multiple SERPs in universal search, almost always in the following order: the original post on Moz a YouTube result complete with a video rich sippet This has me asking the following questions - I have some theories - but i'd love your input: Why use two platforms to upload and host the video? Why not just YouTube? Why avoid using Schema on the Wistia video hosted on the original post? Surely, this would allow an additional result in Google Video Search? Why wait 3-6 months after the first post to upload the YouTube video?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
Adding Video to Landing Pages-Beneficial SEO Effect in Terms of Links & Visitor Engagement?
I run a New York City commercial real estate in New York City. Lately, I have started to produce 30-second videos about property listings and neighborhoods. I have noticed that the engagement for these videos on Facebook is much higher that for text posts. Should adding these videos on our website (hosting them on Youtube) result in increased visitor engagement? Could there be a positive SEO effect such as more links and higher quality links? Anyone have any experience with this? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Adding videos to a website
Hello! We are producing multiple videos (each about 1-minute long) for a company website. We have decided to use Wistia to host them, in order get the full SEO benefits of links to the videos. I have two questions: 1. Would it definitely be better for SEO to divide up the videos and place them on the various existing pages of the site that are related to the video content, rather than putting all the videos together on a separate video page? 2. If we do put different videos on different pages, would it be a bad idea also to have a video page with all the videos together? Would this be considered duplicate content? Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyc-seo0 -
How Do You Remove Video Thumbnails From Google Search Result Pages?
This is going to be a long question, but, in a nutshell, I am asking if anyone knows how to remove video thumbnails from Google's search result pages? We have had video thumbnails show up next to many of our organic listings in Google's search result pages for several months. To be clear, these are organic listings for our site, not results from performing a video search. When you click on the thumbnail or our listing title, you go to the same page on our site - a list of products or the product page. Although it was initially believed that these thumbnails drew the eye to our listings and that we would receive more traffic, we are actually seeing severe year over year declines in traffic to our category pages with thumbnails vs. category pages without thumbnails (where average rank remained relatively constant). We believe this decline is due to several things: An old date stamp that makes our listing look outdated (despite the fact that we can prove Google has spidered and updated their cache of these pages as recent as 2 days ago). We have no idea where Google is getting this datestamp from. An unrelated thumbnail to the page title, etc. - sometimes a picture of a man's face when the category is for women's handbags A difference in intent - user intends to shop or browse, not watch a video. They skip our listing because it looks like a video even though both the thumbnail and our listing click through to a category page of products. So we want to remove these video thumbnails from Google's search results without removing our pages from the index. Does anyone know how to do this? We believed that this connection between category page and video was happening in our video sitemap. We have removed all reference to video and category pages in the sitemap. After making this change and resubmitting the sitemap in Webmaster Tools, we have not seen any changes in the search results (it's been over 2 weeks). I've been reading and it appears many believe that Google can identify video embedded in pages. That makes sense. We can certainly remove videos from our category pages to truly remove the connection between category page URL and video thumbnail. However, I don't believe this is enough because in some cases you can find video thumbnails next to listings where the page has not had a video thumbnail in months (example: search for "leather handbags" and find www.ebags.com/category/handbags/m/leather - that video does not exist on that page and has not for months. Similarly, do a search for "handbags" and find www.ebags.com/department/handbags. That video has not been on that page since 2010. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharieBags0 -
Are videos content to Google bot? and other questions.
It seems as though my site has been hit, possibly because of above the fold adverts or lack of content above the fold, so I have a number of questions regarding this. 1. Are videos regarded as content by Google Bot? 2. If three adverts are placed above the fold with text content clearly readable. Will these three adverts still affect my search engine rankings? 3. Is it better to put text before the video and have the video placed a bit lower? 4. I have a number of pages that have video but no text, could these pages combine to decrease the value of my best landing pages? thanks 😄
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phoenixcg0 -
Does Google Index Videos onsite when using JQuery?
Hi, I'm showing my videos using jquery lightbox etc. This means that I do not have the normal YouTube "embedding" code onpage. Does anyone know if Google will somehow index my videos? Any solutions / ideas? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Video XML Sitemap
I've been recently been information by our dev team that we are not allowed legally to make our raw video files available in a video XML sitemap...This is one of the required tags. Has anyone run into a similar situation and has figured out a way around it? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Margarita
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MargaritaS0 -
SEO Best Practices for Video Sites
What are the SEO Best Practices for video sites? Is there a guideline for this in SEOMOZ? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | merkal20050