Site videos and rich snippets - where to place video

[jasef]

Hi all,

we have product videos that we are putting on our (new) site. The video thumbnail for a product is displayed along with image thumbnails on the product details page i.e. see here:

http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/twin-dvd-player/nextbase-sdv48ac/

Click on the video thumbnail and a lightbox pop up window displays the movie. We would like to markup the videos with rich snippet markup. Is this possible with the videos setup in this way (i.e. video displayed in Lightbox) or would we need to embed the video in the product description text on this page (rather than thumbnail with Lightbox popup as it is at the moment) so that we stood a chance of getting a rich snippet on Google SERPs for our product detail pages?

Thanks for any help.

[PhilNottingham]

The video is still behind Javascript there, which could prevent the content from being indexed.

It's hard for me to say one way or the other without testing, but my gut instinct is to say you'll still struggle to get the videos indexed. Google can execute some JavaScript, but from tests i've done it's not super consistent.

Also - don't use YouTube to host those videos - it's not a wise move (more details here: http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy), especially since you're allowing others to advertise on your videos.

[jasef]

Hi Phil (or any one else out there who is in the know),

hoping you could very briefly comment on whether you think how the videos are now technically implemented on our site is better than how they were before (which was in a lightbox which was calling another page i.e. as per above conversation). I believe it is ... but that means very little! Link to page with videos on it below:

http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/twin-dvd-player/nextbase-sdv49ac/

Ultimately the aim is to markup our videos with rich snippet markup with the hope of getting a thumbnail image with our page listing on Google.

Thanks for any comments.

[jasef]

Merci beaucoup Phil.  

[PhilNottingham]

Hi Jason,

my apologies - I didn't realise I'd already looked at the site and offered similar comments previously!

Yes, embedding the videos in the block of text should work fine - just make sure you don't duplicate this in lightbox though, as this may cause some confusion for Googlebot.

I'm afraid I can't quite remember what the site looked like last time, but I have to say I actually think the overall look, feel and structure is pretty decent. Good job! My main concern generally speaking would be with the site build and the back-end. It's currently very slow to load and things like the drop-down don't work very well on tablets/mobile devices. As mentioned, the videos are also delivered through a lightbox in a slightly strange way which isn't great for SEO.

Video wise - I do completely take your point about the value of the content even though it's not ideal, however, I would advise extreme caution if you're serious about trying to rank with rich snippets. It's not easy to "undo" getting a video rich snippet - and if the poor quality thumb actually lowers your CTR and therefore rankings, it'll obviously be pretty disastrous for you. So, I definitely recommend split testing this if you can before pushing ahead - using SERP Turkey as a tool to do this for you.

[jasef]

Hi Phil,

thanks for the reply.

That's what i thought. Maybe as a short cut we will embed the video content directly in the product description text for now and hopefully that should then solve the issue for us, for now? Following which we can then look at a change of how the videos are implemented in a lightbox style implementation in the future as & when we have time and budget to spend on this.

With regards to the video quality... it's OK, I know you're not a fan! But thanks for taking the time to re-comment.  

Here's a chat we had mid point last year when we were just implementing these: http://moz.com/community/q/vimeo-pro-video-seo-and-rich-snippets

... we / I listened to you re the web site itself and didn't disagree at all with what you were saying re our site look / design and its impact on legitimacy / quality, site URLs and had known for sometime that we had to make a change. Thus following that discussion and other discussions I had already had with our then SEO company and another ecommerce site owner we implemented a Magento install which went live end Aug. We're now working hard to try and pull back our rankings and traffic, which has taken a hit after the implementation - but we knew that was the risk. But I think we have a much better front end site and a much better underlying platform to move forward with and grow (hopefully!).

With regards the videos, they aren't professionally created, we will hold our hands up to that. We felt there wasn't any point trying to achieve that on our "budget" as it wouldn't / couldn't ever happen and would probably look much worse if we did try to achieve that. We are a small business that is (we like to feel) expert in its area and are trying to achieve a niche where we are the "friendly expert" and give an unsurpassed level of service & support that isn't available from the corporates that we compete directly against. Our videos we felt show information to our customers, who are close to making a purchase decision, that they cant actually see anywhere else online (but could see if they were in a shop) and this is what we felt added the value. Plus it is unique content for our site which we hope cant hurt.

We hoped / hope that even though the content isn't smooth, beautifully animated etc etc the pluses mentioned above outweigh this.

As we move forward with the videos hopefully we can improve in the future... these are step 1 for our informational videos, step 1 of improving web site look / feel etc. All to be honed in the future.

As always any comments gratefully received ... on videos, new web site etc!!

[PhilNottingham]

It is possible to get videos indexed in a lightbox, but it all depends whether or not Google succeed in understanding your execution.

As your implementation currently links to another page with the embedded video player on it, then pulls this page up in the lightbox - I'd confidently say that this won't work for you. From a crawler standpoint, the video lives on this page http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/videogallery/gallery/single/product_id/443/media_video_id/24/, not this page http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/twin-dvd-player/nextbase-sdv48ac/.

So, in order to make this work, you will need to find a different way of implementing your lightbox, ideally using just CSS or with simple JavaScript.

The one thing just to flag as a point of concern - the videos in the example are extremely low quality. If you are trying to get thumbnails of those videos displaying alongside your listings, I'd be concerned that you may actually drop traffic, rather than increase it.

I hope that's useful!

Thanks,
Phil.