At day two of Google’s annual I/O conference the company previewed new reports coming to Search Console that will provide more data about videos.
To make video indexing easier to track and diagnose, Google will soon be adding new sets of data to Search Console.
Currently, Google Search Console only reports on videos as it relates to structured data.
If you publish videos on your site, and mark them up with structured data, you can use Search Console to check if the markup is valid and how many impressions a video received.
Soon you can use Search Console to check the indexing status of videos and the landing pages they appear on.
Video Page Indexing Report
The first step to indexing videos is indexing the landing page where the video appears.
Then Google has to recognize there’s a video prominently located on the page, and extract key information about it.
A new Video Page Indexing report in Search Console will show a summary of all indexed pages Google found with video on them.
At a glance you’ll see in how many landing pages a video was detected, and whether Google was able to index the videos it found.
The report will provide details such as affected video pages’ URLs. You’ll be able to download a list of examples and double check them.
With this, you could narrow down the details and understand what’s happening and how to resolve issues.
Like other Search Console reports, this report will have a Validate Fix button to notify Google that an issue has been resolved.
Check Video Indexing Status
You’ll be able to check the indexing status of a video by entering the URL of the landing page into the URL Inspection tool.
This will show you the current status of the URL, as well as the video indexing status of the page. You’ll see whether Google detected a video on the page and if it was able to index the video.
Note that Google only indexes one video per page even if there are multiple videos on the page.
In Summary
With the new report you’ll be able to:
- See how many video landing pages Google discovered and in how many of them a video was indexed.
- Examine reasons for unindexed videos in video landing pages.
- Use the list of affected video pages URLs to debug and fix issues.
- Validate fix to initiate re-crawling of known URLs affected.
- Check the video indexing status of a specific video page using the URL Inspection tool.
Source: Google Search Central
Featured Image: Screenshot from YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral, May 2022.
