Google announce new video indexing report

In recognition of the growing popularity of video creation and consumption on the web, Google announced on 11 June 2022 the launch of a new video indexing report within Search Console.

This handy new report shows the status of video indexing on your site and will help you understand how your videos are performing. Allowing you to identify, fix and validate errors which are preventing your videos being indexed and discovered on the web.

It shows you:

  • How many indexed pages on your site contain a video that Google has indexed, and details about the indexed video.
  • The number of indexed pages on your site where Google found one or more videos, but could not index any video, and details about why not.

It also allows you to dive deeper into possible areas for improvement and troubleshoot identified issues preventing videos from being indexed. Such as:

  • Unsupported video format
  • Video too large or too small
  • Invalid video URL
  • Thumbnail is missing or invalid
  • Video not processed
  • Cannot determine video position or size

As well as highlighting issues with video indexing, the report also provides the ability to validate any fixes made and track how fixed video pages are updated in the Google index.

Search Console Video Indexing Report

Source: Google

 

Something to note is that this report is different to the Video Rich Results report as it focuses purely on indexing – whether search engines can find and serve your video content. Not whether structured data is correct.

Enhanced URL inspection tool to include video

To complement the new video index report, Google has also updated their URL inspection tool to allow you to check the video indexing status of a specific page.

Where Google detects a video on a page you will see the following useful information in the results:

  • Details such as the video URL and the thumbnail URL.
  • The page status showing whether the video was indexed or not.
  • List of issues preventing the video from being indexed.
Video URL inspection

Source: Google

Something to bear in mind is that this does not apply to live inspection.  Live inspection will only indicate if a video was detected on the page being inspected.

If you can’t see this report in search console just now – don’t panic!  This new report is being rolled out gradually over the next few months so will be arriving soon.

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Nicola Brown

Head of Digital Marketing at Immedia Creative, Nicola has a background in marketing and over 10 years experience in running successful SEO, Social and Content Marketing campaigns.

Google announce new video indexing report