Wednesday, March 17, 2021
As global online video consumption continues to grow, Google aims to surface video content from diverse sources across the web. We want to make it easy for site owners to get their videos indexed and surfaced on Google.
Today, we’re excited to share two new resources to help you optimize your videos for Google Search and Discover.
Search Central Lightning Talk
In this new lightning talk, we discuss how Google indexes videos, highlight features where videos appear on Google, and share five key tips to optimize your videos for Search and Discover:
- 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
noindexmetadata. - Provide structured data with
VideoObjectmarkup. Follow the guidelines in our Video structured data documentation. - Include high-quality thumbnails. Without a valid thumbnail image, the video may not be indexed. See more best practices for video thumbnails.
- Submit a video sitemap. You can find guidelines and examples in our video sitemap documentation.
- Make video content files accessible. This allows Google to understand the video contents and enable features like video previews and key moments. Follow these best practices to allow Google to fetch your video files.
Video best practices
In addition to the lightning talk, we also updated our Video best practices guide to clarify the most important steps you can take to help Google find, index, and understand your videos. The guide shows you how to:
- 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
We’ll continue to update this page over time with our latest recommendations, alongside our video structured data guide.
We hope you find these resources helpful, and we’d love to hear your questions and feedback. Share your questions in the Google Search Central Help Community, connect with @googlesearchc on Twitter, or file feedback directly on our documentation pages.