In mid-2022, Google rolled out a new feature called the Search Console Video index report. The purpose of this is to help you understand how videos you post on your website are performing on Google.
In my opinion, this new feature is especially helpful to video-centric websites, and isn’t very important for most music schools, unless they are regularly publishing blogs that includes videos for SEO purposes.
If you have a website that is connected to Google Search Console and you have videos on it, you may occasionally receive an e-mail report from Google called the “video indexing report”. You will not receive this e-mail if you do not have videos on your website, or if you are not using Google Search Console.
If you have received this e-mail from Google Search Console recently and it says that “issues” have been detected, you may have been alarmed.
As of February 2023, This e-mail usually is no cause for concern unless you run a VERY video heavy website.
What is the Video Indexing Report?
The video indexing report is comes from Google Search console and is sent to you when Google has detected videos on your website.
This report can show you a number of things, including which videos are indexed, how many pages they’re indexed on, and what issues Google has picked up with the videos that may cause them to not be indexed (such as an incompatible file type, or too large or small of a video)
What does “New Video page indexing issues detected” mean in Google Search Console?
| “Search Console Video page indexing issues detected in website.com To the owner of website.com Search Console has identified that your site is affected by 1 Video page indexing issue(s). The following issues were found on your site. Top Issues Google could not determine the prominent video on the page We recommend that you fix these issues when possible to enable the best experience and coverage in Google Search. Fix Video page indexing issues“ |
What to do when you get a video indexing issues detected e-mail from Google?
- Open Google Search Console
- Under “indexing” on the left, select “video pages”
- Under the graph, find the area that says: “Why videos in pages aren’t indexed”
- Click on “Google could not determine the prominent video on the page”
- Inspect the list of pages that are there and determine if any of those pages have videos that are very important.
If this is a blog post on your website, and you’d like to push the video more than the text content on that page, move it to the top of the blog.
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From Google (Jan 2023):
About video prominence
When a video isn’t the main content of a page, the “prominence” of a video on the page is an important signal to Google about whether or not to index the video. In a page with multiple videos, a prominent video will typically be chosen ahead of a non-prominent video for indexing.
To be considered prominent, a video should:
- Be within view when the page loads (be “above the fold”).
- Be appropriately sized (neither too large nor too small).
