Video indexing: Key tips and tactics

Before diving into indexing, make sure that your pages with videos can be crawled and that you are helping Google discover your videos.

Below are some checks you need to perform to index your videos properly.

Video formatting

Video file names containing special characters and underscores might discourage search engines from indexing them.

Also, improperly formatted pages with videos could lead to non-indexing or some components being ignored for indexing (e.g., SWF).

Make sure your videos follow these guidelines:

• Descriptive filenames: Opt for filenames that accurately reflect the video content.
• Supported file formats: Upload videos in any of the supported formats, such as 3GP, 3G2, ASF, AVI, DivX, M2V, M3U, M3U8, M4V, MKV, MOV, MP4, MPEG, OGV, QVT, RAM, RM, VOB, WebM, WMV and XAP.

Applying these recommendations boosts your video indexing chances.

Structured data

Structured data helps search engines understand your content better, making it easier for them to index.

Google gains a better understanding of your video content when you provide clear instructions or relevant information to your audience.

This is imperative within the e-learning segment, where structured data for educational videos, concepts and skills covered in the video significantly contribute to content understanding.

To debug your video structured data, you should head to the Schema.org validator and input your URL to test. You want to make sure the validator returns a comprehensive @VideoObject schema markup just like the following.

Schema mark-up validation is an important step for SEO and shouldn’t be limited to the syntax and grammar of your schema.

Once Schema.org validates your @VideoObject markup, you can use the Rich Results Testing tool to check if the page qualifies for a video rich snippet.

Here are three bonus tips to optimize your video schema markup:

• Before implementation, decide on self-hosting vs. YouTube embedding so you can use the most appropriate property to nest within the @VideoObject schema. Google offers a comprehensive guide covering these options.
• Avoid schema markup stuffing. Not all the properties I listed in the validation screenshot above are mandatory because they may refer to bits of information that don’t exist on your website. Include only existing information to prevent schema markup stuffing
• Align timezone with uploadDate schema property. Ensure the timezone specified in the uploadDate property matches the website’s geographic location. Google recently emphasized this to avoid defaulting to the US timezone for Googlebot.

Video sitemaps

If your website is mostly videos, relying solely on structured data might not be enough to tell search engines how important your videos are. Especially if you’re a publisher, you might need to create a dedicated XML video sitemap to help Google find your videos.

For your video sitemap, make sure to include the following tags:

• <video:video>
  • The parent element for all information about a single video on the page specified by the <loc> tag.
• <video:thumbnail_loc>
  • A URL pointing to the video thumbnail image file.
• <video:title>
  • The title of the video.
• <video:description>
  • A description of the video
• <video:content_loc>
  • This is used to include one URL pointing to the actual video media file and it must not be the same as the URL in the parent <loc> tag.
• <video:player_loc>
  • An alternative of video:content_loc for Vimeo, YouTube and other video hosting platforms that allow embedding videos through iframe.

The official video guidelines state Google prefers <video:content_loc>. If it’s not available, you can use <video:player_loc> as an alternative.

When video is not the main content

Google has announced that video thumbnails on the main search results page will now only appear if the video is the primary content of a page.

For pages with videos to get rich results on the SERP, videos must be the primary content. Otherwise, the video is supplementary and it won’t appear in search results.

In other words, a page with videos may get indexed but might not rank with their own videos.

But is that really so?

Out in the wild, you would find websites with self-hosted videos ranking in video mode with a rich snippet.

A research for “luxury jewellery” on the UK SERPs suggests that luxury brands ranking in video mode should entail pages with videos being the main content.

However, after clicking on Chaumet’s rich result, you’ll land on the brand’s homepage where the video is in the hero banner and introduces the whole range of products.

Based on the above tests, you can address the “Video is not the main content” issue by considering:

• Positioning the video above the fold or in the most renderable area.
• Self-hosting the video with proper HTML formatting, as mentioned above.

Make your videos easy to find and index

Adding videos to your pages gives your audience a more interesting experience. Google likes pages with a mix of good text, images and videos.

But you have to do it right; otherwise, you might miss chances to guide your prospects.

Follow these steps to help Google find and list your videos on your site. This way, your video content will be easy for people to find and enjoy.