In April 2023 and December 2023 Google changed how it classifies what it would consider video pages. In short, the video on the page needs to be the main piece of content for Google to show it a video thumbnail in the search results and to show it in the videos tab in Google Search.
In fact, many saw a huge spike in video not the main content of page notices in Search Console in late December – including this site.
Google told us back then the video needs to be in your face. And now John Mueller from Google is repeating that on X saying:
It really needs to be a super-obvious video play-page, especially on mobile. I’ve seen folks tweak their HTML a bit too, to move the video elements/objects a bit more into the front & center. It shouldn’t be a random video that’s accessory to text, it should be primarily a video.
A while back, I moved my Friday video recap posts to show the video at the top of the page, so it looks like this:
But that did not change anything. Truth is, I consider those posts video-first posts but I also include a text summary of what I cover below it. So I can see why Google disagrees with me.
In any event, here is the context of John Mueller’s new messaging around this:
Mobile viewport: pic.twitter.com/x1cSCqlQAF
โ Martin MacDonald ๐ฆ๐บ๐ธ๐ช๐ธ๐ฌ๐ง ๐ฆ (@searchmartin) May 3, 2024
Above the fold in the crawled viewport seems reasonable – probably want to have videoobject schema too ๐คทโโ๏ธ
โ Martin MacDonald ๐ฆ๐บ๐ธ๐ช๐ธ๐ฌ๐ง ๐ฆ (@searchmartin) May 3, 2024
yea, when i moved my weekly video to the top, it didn’t work https://t.co/dc7NG36b3c
โ Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) May 3, 2024
I don’t want to remove the text from those video pages but I do honestly believe the video on those pages are primary.
Forum discussion at X.
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