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- An old date stamp that makes our listing look outdated (despite the fact that we can prove Google has spidered and updated their cache of these pages as recent as 2 days ago).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?
-
Thanks Phil. Unfortunately we have not seen any changes since removing video entries in our sitemap associated with list (category) pages.
For the two examples above (the videos associated with www.ebags.com/category/handbags/m/leather and www.ebags.com/department/handbags), I even went so far as to deactivate the video entirely in our video provider and I verified that these videos are not in our YouTube channel.
This is really baffling.
-
Hi Shari,
This is a really interesting situation and, to be honest, I haven't seen anything quick like it before. All of the on-page information indicates that Google should not be indexing the pages you referenced with video snippets - yet, they are and with extremely unusual choices of thumbnail (the low quality of most of the thumbs would be my guess for the reason you've seen such a drop).
Therefore, my assessment, as you intimated, is that there were strange errors going on with the video sitemap that were attributing certain pages with videos and thumbnails not actually present on the page. If you've now fixed all of that in the sitemap (you seem to have have done), then in theory the snippets should fix themselves upon re-indexation, but I would expect this to take longer than two weeks in the majority of cases. From what I've observed, Google sort of treat their video index as slightly different to their general page index and so simply recrawling a page does not guarantee that the video sitemap entry has been reindexed.
So, my recommended action for you would be to wait it out for another 6 weeks or so and see if anything shifts. If not, drop me a private message and I'll happily look into this a bit further for you, mostly because it's a really interesting case and I'd like to work out what's going on.
In terms of fixing pages where you would like to keep the video present, but not have the video indexed - you can either remove the video sitemap entry for that page, or adjust the sitemap entry to include a more eye-catching and interesting thumbnail. You shouldn't need to remove the videos from the page, since you haven't implemented Schema mark-up or open graph tags on your videos - both of which can assist with indexation.
However, if none of the above works, then another plausible explanation for your situation may be that Google are trying to execute and index some of your JavaScript used in the side bar to serve the videos and in the process are getting very confused as to which page which video should be attributed to. If this is the case, you would need to look at a fundamental restructuring of the way you include video on your pages.
Please keep me updated with regards to the situation!
Thanks,
Phil.
-
Hi ShariSEO,
So, I found this by heading over to Google Webmaster Tools:
Have look down this page and find the section that talks about, "Create high-quality thumbnail images". I'm curious if you are able to update a new thumbnail, to replace any "auto-populated" thumbnail that Google is auto-inserting for you.
Also, you might just be missing some simple metadata, within a video sitemap, to define what Google needs (metadata), to update your thumbnail. Are you using metadata for your videos?
Lastly, Danny Dover mentions Thumbnails in this video, around the 7:34 mark, but you might want to listen to the entire video, because he gives some nice tips, regarding video embedding and how to tell YouTube to act upon the sitemap and metadata.
I hope this was helpful!
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
-
How to remove wrong crawled domain from Google index
Hello, I'm running a Wordpress multisite. When I create a new site for a client, we do the preparation using the multisite domain address (ex: cameleor.cobea.be). To keep the site protected we use the "multisite privacy" plugin which allows us to restrict the site to admin only. When site is ready we a domain mapping plugin to redirect the client domain to the multisite (ex: cameleor.com). Unfortunately, recently we switched our domain mappin plugin by another one and 2 sites got crawled by Google on their multsite address as well. So now when you type "cameleor" in Google you get the 2 domains in SERPS (see here http://screencast.com/t/0wzdrYSR). It's been 2 weeks or so that we fixed the plugin issue and now cameleor.cobea.be is redirected to the correct address cameleor.com. My question: how can I get rid of those wrong urls ? I can't remove it in Google Webmaster Tools as they belong to another domain (cf. cameleor.cobea.be for which I can't get authenticated) and I wonder if will ever get removed from index as they still redirect to something (no error to the eyes of Google)..? Does anybody has an idea or a solution for me please ? Thank you very much for your help Regards Jean-Louis
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JeanlouisSEO0 -
Page indexed but not showing up at all in search results
I am currently working on the SEO for a roofing company. I have developed GEO targeted pages for both commercial and residential roofing (as well as attic insulation and gutters) and have hundreds of 1st page placements for the GEO targeted keywords. What is baffling me is that they are performing EXTREMELY poorly on the bigger cities, to the point of not evening showing up in the first 5 pages. I also target a page specifically for roof repair in Phoenix and it is not coming up AT ALL. This is not typically the results I get when directly targeting keywords. I'm working on implementing keyword variations as well as adding about 10 or so information pages (@ 700 words) regarding different roofing systems which I plan to cross link on the site, etc. I'm just wondering if there is a simple answer as to why the pages I want to be showing up the most are performing so poorly and what I would need to do to improve their rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dogstarweb0 -
Help! Why did Google remove my images from their index?
I've been scratching my head over this one for a while now and I can't seem to figure it out. I own a website that is user-generated content. Users submit images to my sites of graphic resources (for designers) that they have created to share with our community. I've been noticing over the past few months that I'm getting completely dominated in Google Images. I used to get a ton of traffic from Google Images, but now I can't find my images anywhere. After diving into Analytics I found this: http://cl.ly/140L2d14040Q1R0W161e and realized sometime about a year ago my image traffic took a dive. We've gone back through all the change logs and can't find where we made any changes to the site structure that could have caused this. We are stumped. Does anyone know of any historical Google updates that could have caused this last year around the end of April 2010? Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shawn810 -
Search result clicks for one of my posts down significantly
I started receiving a warning warning in google webmaster tools about 2 weeks ago that said "big traffic change for top url". On reading the message i saw "Search results clicks for http://goo.gl/EyhUJ have decreased significantly". When I search google using the keyword "sore breasts" for which that post used to rank at least number 2 on google, I dont see anything. The related post http://goo.gl/vP025 is still ranking well. Can anyone give me an idea of what might have happened? I am totally at sea. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adaeze0 -
3 results for a site on page one?!?
Hi, I've never seen a website rank on page 1 in position 2, 3 and 4 for one query, completely separate results as well. I thought they limited the amount of results from a website on each page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Removing a Page From Google index
We accidentally generated some pages on our site that ended up getting indexed by google. We have corrected the issue on the site and we 404 all of those pages. Should we manually delete the extra pages from Google's index or should we just let Google figure out that they are 404'd? What the best practice here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles0 -
Foreign languages and first page listings on search engines
I have a customer that has asked me to find out the best way to move forwards with foreign languages. He sells Jukeboxes in the UK and has found recently that a large number of his customers are coming from abroad due to the financial climate. So he wants to appear on the first page of google in Russia, Arabic countries, French speaking countries and China. Whats the best route ? Add pages to his current .co.uk site or look at purchasing domains for each country. Then submitting them to each google. So Google.ru etc. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0 -
Google replacing subpages in index with home page?
Hi! I run a backlink building company. Recently, we had a customer who had us build targeted backlinks to certain subpages on his site. Then something really bizarre happened...all of a sudden, their subpages that were indexed in Google (the ones we were building links to) disappeared from the index, to be replaced with their home page. They haven't lost their rank, per se--it's just now their home page instead of their subpages. At this point, we are tracking literally thousands of keywords for our link building customers, and we've never run into this issue before. Have you ever run into it? If so, what's the best way to handle it from an SEO company perspective? They have a sitemap.xml and their GWT account reports no crawl errors, so it doesn't seem to be a site issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ownlocal0