Google Now Displaying Videos in Mobile Image Search Results
Google recently made a major change to its documentation for videos. The company announced that video rich results will now be displayed in image searches on mobile devices.
In order to view the video, users will need to click on the “Watch” option which appears below the image of the video (clicking in the image itself will only bring up a full screen size of the image). Brands will also need to make sure that they properly markup their videos so that their video content will be pulled into image search.
Markup Videos on Google
Brands can markup their videos in one of two ways:
- a) On-page markup
- b) Video sitemaps
On-page markup is described as hidden descriptive data that is added to your web page’s source code. Google strongly recommends using schema.org for on-page markups as it is designed to support all major search engines.
Video sitemaps are XML documents that are submitted to Google. The benefit to this is that video sitemaps tell Google about your video content without you needing to wait for the search engine to automatically “crawl” your video page.
Common Indexing Issues with Videos on Search
There are a number of issues that can interfere with your video’s ability to be returned in search results. Some of the most common include:
- Blocking out resources with robots.txt
- Providing low-quality thumbnail images
- Providing duplicated content
- Setting an expiration date in the past
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