Google added documentation to their Search Central pages offering guidance on a change in how videos are displayed in search results. The change reduces videos shown in search results for certain cases.
The change affects video thumbnails that are show in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Google’s announcement explained the reason for the update:
“Today, we’re making a change so that video thumbnails only appear next to Google search results when the video is the main content of a page.
This will make it easier for users to understand what to expect when they visit a page.”
Previously there were two situations that triggered videos to show in the SERPs when the video appeared on a webpage.
The first situation is when a video is a part of the main content of the page.
When the video is the main content of the page, Google will still show a video thumbnail in the SERPs.
The second situation is when the video that appears on a webpage is not a part of the main content of the page. This specific circumstance will no longer trigger a video thumbnail in the SERPs.
Google’s new guidance notes that their experiments have shown there was minimal impact to publishers in terms of “overall engagement.”
This update will cause changes in the video performance reports shown in Google Search Console.
According to the Search Central documentation:
“This change will impact search appearance reported metrics for videos in the performance report in Search Console.
There will be annotations in the video indexing report and the video enhancements report.”
Along with this guidance on the change to what videos are shown, Google recommended that publishers review their Video SEO best practices page.
Read Google’s announcement: