Why Your Videos Aren’t Showing in Google & How to Fix It

How to Check if Your Videos are Being Indexed in Google Search

Google has made updates to the search engine results pages including generative AI beta testing, rich snippets and people also ask sections. Some searches will show videos at the top of search results above paid and organic search results. These are all opportunities to expose your content and products to users asking questions in Search Engines.

For Example: “attaching Burley trailer to bike”

We see a video with instructions for Burley hitch installation at the top of search results. YouTube and Google have different indexing so if a video is being hosted on your website and embedded within the content it may not be indexed by Search Engines. 

To check if videos on your website are being shown on search engines you’ll need to visit your Search Console. 

Navigate to your domain and select “Search Results” in the left navigation bar, then select a time period. 

Select “Search Appearance” on the bottom bar above the main KPIs. Here you will be able to see the different ways Google serves your web pages and content within search results (FAQs, Products, Videos, Reviews, etc.). If you do not see a video section that means Google hasn’t crawled or attempted to index any videos. 

As a result of the changes, you may see a steep drop off in the number of clicks and impressions your videos have received in search results. 

Google's Changes to Video Indexing Guidelines

To discover what videos are being crawled and indexed on your website select “video pages'' on the same left navigation bar. If you have videos embedded on your website you may see an increase in the number of videos being crawled and not indexed.

Google’s New Video Guidelines

In November 2023 Google made a quiet change to their video indexing guidelines. Google Search team stipulated that videos hosted on the website are required to have their own page where the video is the main content of that page. The video can be embedded on any other pages and interspersed within content but the video must also have its own dedicated page. 

This change only affects videos in Google Search, not videos that are hosted in YouTube. 

Updating Your Website so Your Videos are Being Shown in Google Search

If you have a large amount of videos that you want visitors to be able to navigate and view via your website you should have a page dedicated to search for and navigate your videos. 

To begin having your videos indexed, have a separate page for each video. You can have a short caption on the bottom or synopsis of the video only as long as there is only one video and it is clearly the main content of that page. This video page should be included in the sitemap and linked to with at least one link so bots can follow and it doesn’t look like an orphan page to Google. 

Improve Your Chances of Your Videos Being Indexed 

To improve your chances of being indexed high in Google search results we recommend video structured data for pages with videos. This can be handled by an app or plug in, or manually installing it on each page. TechnicalSEO.com has a flexible structured data builder for most types of website schema. 

After making these changes review Google Search Console for updates on the video pages being indexed. If you want to manually check whether Google is indexing a page you can type “site:https://yourwebsite.com/video-page/” in the Google search bar and you will only see the page following “site:” if it is being indexed. 

For a website audit or more information on our SEO services, reach out to us at Foghorn Labs.