As global online video consumption continues to grow, Google is aiming to surface video content from diverse sources across the web. The company wants to make it easy for site owners to get their videos indexed and surfaced on Google.
To help with this, they've released two new resources. The first is a lightning talk which discusses how Google indexes videos, highlights features where videos appear on Google, and shares five key tips to optimize your videos for Search and Discover.
The key tips are as follows:
- Make your videos available on the web. Each video must be available on a public web page that isn't blocked by robots.txt or noindex metadata.
- Provide structured data with
VideoObjectmarkup. Follow the guidelines in our Video structured data documentation.
Google has released a new guide on best practices for videos. The guide includes tips on how to make your videos more accessible to Google, so that features like video previews and key moments are more likely to appear in search results. The guide also advises on how to submit a video sitemap, and how to ensure that thumbnails are high quality and included with each video. You can find the full guide here:
Google has released some new recommendations for how to ensure that your videos can be found and properly indexed by their search engine. These recommendations include:
- Help Google find your videos
- Ensure your videos can be indexed
- Allow Google to fetch your video content files
- Enable specific video features
- Remove, restrict, or update your videos as needed
Google has also announced that they will be periodically updating this page with new recommendations, so it's important to check back often. In addition, they have created a video structured data guide to help webmasters properly mark up their videos for indexing.