My wistia videos are not being index by Google. Does anyone know what can be happening?
-
I have the wistia site map on my robots.txt file and I also manually submit the site map to google.
It shows that my videos were submitted successfully but they are not being indexed. Thanks
-
Hi,
The video being too far down the page might be an issue. I've seen this cause problems before, and in your case I think it could be a problem. More broadly though, I don't think you should have those videos on the category pages, because the video itself is just image slideshow and actually does more to hamper the using experience rather than help it. As rich snippets aren't common any more, I don't think you're going to get much value from having these videos on those pages.
Having the sitemap hosted at Wistia isn't a problem. You can point to a sitemap hosted on any site.
Other likely problems are duplicate content. You seem to have significant duplicate content issues as I'm seeing about 3 variations of that page indexed.
Hope that's useful,
Phil.
-
Hi Phil,
I've always appreciated reading your comments to others but I wanted to reach out to you with a question.
We are having a similar issue with our Wistia video's not being indexed (it's been several months). The funny thing is that our videos, which are hosted by Wistia, used to be indexed before we launched our responsive design site upgrade. The older version had the video near the top of the page, but it was under a "tab". The new version, the video is down a lot farther (to make room for our product options), but it is no longer in a tab. http://www.hairbowcenter.com/ribbon/grosgrain-ribbon/hbc-solid-grosgrain-ribbon/browse-by-width-hbc-grosgrain/3-grosgrain-ribbon-solid-hbc-75mm.html
We noticed that the video's themselves do show up when you view the page as google. If you look at the cached page, the video is there along with the closed captioning.
We have had several opinions as to what could cause the issue:
1) Video is too far down on the page. We are not quite sure how to fix this as it would further push down our products and this is primarily a e-commerce page
2) Video sitemap is hosted at Wistia: I"m not sure if this would matter as it seems to work for everyone else and it used to work for us. We have a roboxt.txt file pointing to Wistia.
If you have any thoughts on what the issue might be, I'd love to hear them.Thanks
-
You're most welcome!
-
Another suggestion...
Being a huge fan of Wistia, there directions do clearly say, one video per page. So this is what we do. We have a video on one page with ONLY the video transcript. We give google the url to this page only. For the videos where our shoppers view, like our product pages, etc, we use the thumbnail with popup, this way it keeps the consumer on the page were they can purchase.
Also dont be afraid to email the wistia support, they are fantastic. Good luck!
Cathy
-
Thank you very much! Your help was much appreciated!!
Let the "waiting period" begin
Thanks
Michelle
-
Videos using a lightbox will sometimes get indexed - it really depends on whether or not Google manage to execute the JS - and this really depends on the whole site architecture. It might be an issue for you, it might not.
My gut is that the main issue at this stage is just time, so I'd definitely give it a few more weeks before taking any further action.
From personal experience, I would be extremely surprised if the position of the video has anything to do with it - "the fold" is a much less concretely defined concept than it once was and your videos are perfectly prominent on the page.
-
Hello Phil,
Very helpful answer! Thank you.
We have some pages where we only have one video per page, just like you mentioned. For example: http://goo.gl/PX6X6E
We are trying different things in different pages to see if googlebot likes a specific scenario.
We saw some sites where the video was indexed and it was showing on google search and they were using the lightbox, that's why we decided to try that as well. We were wondering if the position of the video on the page had anything to do with the index success. Since a lot of our videos are being embed after the fold.
I guess, if googlebot likes the "one video per page" those pages with only one video should be indexed. We'll see! I'll wait a little longer.
Thank you!
Michelle
-
Hi Michelle,
So - firstly, a week is not enough time to determine whether there is a problem with indexation. Videos can take weeks and even months to get indexed, even with all the appropriate mark-up applied, and so I'd recommended at least holding fire for a few more weeks before being too concerned.
However... there are quite a few things on the page in question which could confuse Googlebot and therefore pose problems for you. Firstly, you've embedded the same video twice on the page - once in a lightbox behind a JavaScript Trigger, and then once just embedded into the page. It's hard to know whether Google will be able to execute that JavaScript successfully, but it's highly possible this double embed could confuse Googlebot (and confuse users!). Is there any particular reason why you've embedded the video twice? Secondly, you've also embedded a load of YouTube videos at the bottom of the page. YouTube videos get indexed on the pages they're embedded on instantly, but don't often rank with rich snippets in the blended organic results. This is also a fairly confusing signal to Googlebot, where the "one video per page" model still seems to be the most effective way of getting everything indexed correctly.
I hope that's useful!
Phil
-
hello Erica,
Thank you for your answer.
I already watched all the videos I could find on the subject including videos from Wistia, Distilled and MOZ blog and It seems like I did everything the way I am supposed to.
This is one of my product pages that have the wistia video embed.
I have the wistia site map on my robots.txt file and I also manually submit one to google webmaster tools.
It's been a week since I submitted my video site map, there are no errors, but only the URL's were indexed, none of the videos.
Our goal is to display the video thumbnail on the search results next to our product pages.
thank you!
Michelle
-
Hello Phil,
Thank you for your time. I watched all your videos on this subject and I can't find what is causing the issue.
This is one of my product pages that have the wistia video embed.
I have the wistia site map on my robots.txt file and I also manually submit one to google webmaster tools.
It's been a week since I submitted my video site map, there are no errors, but only the URL's were indexed, none of the videos.
Our goal is to display the video thumbnail on the search results next to our product pages.
thank you!
Michelle
-
Are you able to share the site in question?
I'll happily take a look into it for you.
-
Without looking at your exact maps, it's hard to say. I'd suggest reading through and watching Wistia's awesome documentation about Video SEO and seeing if anything pops out as not happening on your end.
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
-
Philosophical: Does Google know when a photo isn't what your meta data says it is? And could you be downgraded for that?
Not something I've ever heard discussed before, probably still a bit too esoteric for present day, but I've always been one to be guided by where I see Google headed rather than trying to game the system as it exists now. So think about it: Most stock and public domain photos are used repeatedly throughout the internet. Google's reverse image search proves that Google can recognize when the same photo is used across dozens of sites. Many of those photos will have alt and/or title text that Google also has crawled. If not it has the content of the page on which the photo exists to consider for context. So if Google has a TON of clues about what a photo is likely to be about, and can in theory aggregate those clues about a single photo from the dozens of sites using it, how might Google treat a site that mislabels it, old school "one of these things is not like the others" style? Would a single site hosting that photo be bolstered by the additional context that the known repeated photo brings in, essentially from other sites? If 10 sites about widgets are using the same widget photo, but the 11th uses an entirely new, never before published photo, would the 11th site then be rated better for bringing something new to the table? (I think this would be almost certainly true, drives home the importance of creating your own graphics content.) Anyway, like I said, all theoretical and philosophical and probably not currently in play, especially since an image can be used in so many different contexts, but it's New Years and things are slow and my brain is running, so I'm curious what other folks might think about that as the future of image optimization.
Image & Video Optimization | | BradsDeals1 -
Product Videos and SEO
We sell high end products and we try to educate the consumer as much as possible. Since the attention span is short, we try and break up the features/functions into 5-6 videos. We post everything to Youtube and we have been adding it to our blog as well. I am currently tasked with rebuilding our blog from the ground up. This means getting rid of all the thin content, updating content, etc. We have many videos up there and Just trying to figure out what the best practice should be. The blog is wordpress based and I have the videos now set up in a category structure. Should I just add each video as a video custom post type? Should I have each video posted with a transcript? Or should I post each video with sub background text of the video? We have about 120 videos in all and adding more, but making them longer to reduce the amount of videos per product going forward. Thank you.
Image & Video Optimization | | RevCom0 -
Updating address in Google Places
My client has moved address to a location in the same city. Will updating his Google Places page lead to a drop in rankings? If so, what is the best way to resolve it?
Image & Video Optimization | | neooptic0 -
How to build links with really good S3 hosted video using JW Player
I have a number of really good quality videos that are embedded on my own site. Many are "how to" or "what to do if" type video guides with questions answered by experts. They were professionally shot. So that I could reap the full SEO benefit from the videos, I have them hosted via Amazon S3 and am using an embedded JW Player. We have a video sitemap and, as a result, most of the videos have already been indexed by Google and are showing up in Google video search as residing on our webpage. Now the real problem is how to get some link benefit from them. They should be viable and valuable link bait. My initial thought was to do a PR Web type press release with the video embedded in it. The problem with that is that you are limited to Youtube and Vimeo embedded video which defeats that purpose entirely. PR Newswire has different issues but the end result is the same, I can't embed those videos with them either. As far as I can tell, all I could do with a press release would be to link to the videos. Moreover, I don't even know that press releases would be that valuable in the post penguin world but the hope was that people would share the videos naturally. So, I put it to the experts. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to get some link benefit from these videos? Any ideas at all? I am stumped. Any advice would be appreciated.
Image & Video Optimization | | LawSEOSeeker0 -
Google + with multiple locations
Hi guys, So I want to make a google + page for my business, which basically lets people find and compare multiple airport shuttle, limo and transfer companies to find the one that is available and best suits their budget.
Image & Video Optimization | | cashchampion
Being that these shuttle services are throughout the country, when I create the google + page I need to choose multiple locations.
Anyone know how to go about this, or the best way to do it? Thanks so much Regards,
Marc0 -
Google Places Multiple Locations Strategy
Hi, I have client who is a psychology college that has multiple locations across the United States. We currently have a Google places setup for their main location which is in Chicago. They also have multiple locations in California and Washington d.c. My question is what is the best strategy for setting up Google places for each one of their locations? can it all be done from the Chicago Google places account or do I have to build out individual Google places accounts for each location. Thanks!
Image & Video Optimization | | MasonInteractive0 -
What's the best method for posting the same video with different phone and address on YouTube?
For a franchise network, what's the best method for posting the same video that is tagged with different phone numbers and address per each location on YouTube? Will this get removed as duplicate content eventually? Or if I use the geo-tagging feature, will this help?
Image & Video Optimization | | BasementSystems760 -
Video on Search Engine Results Page Ranking.
Hi, i have a question. I have a website of my company with Page and Domain Authority 55. PA:58 and DA:55 And now, i like to rank a video for my brand name on SERP. What to do? should i place the video on my main page, domain.com/index.php and to upload the video on the folder domain.com/video/ and than to optimize the video like images for SERP. I read articles online, about video sitemap, optimization etc.. but can you tell me the exactly steps to rank an video. What kind of video embed should i use? to upload at any vimeo,youtube, or should i upload on my hosting, what kind of coding etc.. if you have experience on video ranking, tell me the steps please. Thanks.
Image & Video Optimization | | leadsprofi0