Video indexing report

The video indexing report shows how many indexed pages on your site contain one or more videos, and how many of those pages have a video that could be indexed. Indexed videos can appear in Google search results.

Video indexing report

About the report

The report shows the following information:

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

This report does not show a count of unique videos on your site (unless some very specific conditions* apply to your site).

The report covers only indexed pages. If a page is not indexed for any reason (including being a non-canonical page) then it won't appear in this report.

Using the report

At first glance

Diving deeper

Investigate issues

  1. Click into a specific status (such as "Invalid video URL") to show a list of pages with that issue.
  2. Click a page in the examples table to see information about the video found on that page.
  3. Read the issue details and troubleshooting guide to learn how to fix the issue.

To see pages with videos that could be indexed, click View data about indexed video pages on the main page of the report.

Investigate videos on a specific page

To investigate a specific URL on your site, use the URL Inspection report. If a video was found on the page you will see a Video indexing section in the URL inspection results. If no videos were detected on the page, there will not be a Video indexing section.

Live testing not supported: Video information is available only for the indexed version of the page in the URL inspection report. Search Console does not yet support live testing of videos using the URL Inspection report.
Video indexing details

When Google indexes a page it looks for videos on the page. If any videos are found on the page that fit certain requirements, Google will try to index the best candidate on the page.

Basic video indexing process

  1. When Google crawls a page and decides to index it, Google looks for videos in the page. If you provide information about the video with a sitemap or structured data, Google tries to associate that with a video on the page.
  2. Videos found on the page that pass a video indexing bar are ranked for indexability (not quality or content).
  3. Google tries to index ranked videos in the order of their indexability ranking. A video's prominence on the page is a key factor here.
    • The highest ranking video that can be indexed is associated with this page in the Google index, and the page is added to the Video indexed total in the Video indexing report.
    • If videos were found on the page but none could be indexed, then the page is counted in the No video indexed category in the Video indexing report.
  4. Google will try to fetch a video as part of the ranking and indexing process. However, a video need not be successfully fetched in order to index the video.

Indexed vs fetched

  • Indexed means that Google has entered the video in the Google index. If a video is indexed, it can appear in Search, with features such as a title, description, a thumbnail, and a link to play the video, depending on the available metadata. A video must pass certain requirements to be indexed.
  • A video is successfully fetched when Google has managed to request, get, and read the video file. Fetching is not required for indexing. If a video is successfully fetched, Google will try to analyze the video for content, perhaps to extract a thumbnail, and possibly create pointers to identify key moments in the video to display in search results, as well as other features. You can provide a description, thumbnail, and key moments yourself, using structured data.

A video can be indexed without being successfully fetched. However, if a video can be fetched, it can help Google understand the content of the video, and can also make the video eligible for additional features such as autoplay previews that can significantly improve user engagement.

Read best practices for getting your video indexed and fetched.

Only one video per page can be indexed

Google indexes at most one video per page. If your page contains more than one video, Google will index, at most, only one of the videos embedded in a page.

A video can be indexed from multiple pages

If you include the same video in multiple pages, and each host page can be indexed, then that video might be indexed from each of those pages. Each time a video is indexed, it adds to the Video indexed total, even if the same video is indexed in multiple pages.

If a video is indexed from multiple pages, Google search results can show the video in search results from any of its host pages. However, Google search results will try to show a specific video only once per user search.

Video sitemaps and indexing

If you list a video in a sitemap, there is no guarantee that the specified video will be indexed for that page. Google tries to index the most prominent video on the page, whether or not the video is listed in a sitemap.

If a page is listed as having a video in a sitemap but Google doesn't discover any videos on that page, that page won't be included in this report. Similarly, if the page isn't indexed for some reason it won't appear in this report whether or not it appears in a sitemap.

Video indexing requirements

A video is eligible for indexing on a page only when it meets the following criteria:

  • A video must be embedded within a host page. A video without a host page will not be indexed, even if the video is included in a video sitemap.
  • The host page must be indexed. This means that the page can't be blocked by a robots.txt rule, a noindex rule, or anything else that might prevent indexing. Use the URL Inspection tool to see whether the host page has been indexed (or if it is capable of being indexed). It also means that the video must be in the canonical page, because only canonical pages are indexed.
  • The video must be the main content of the page, on both mobile and desktop versions. More about prominence.
  • The video location must be central on the page. 
    • The entire video must be inside the renderable area of the page.
    • The video must not be too far right or too low on the page. The user must be able to see the entire video when the page loads.
  • A valid thumbnail is required. You should provide a valid thumbnail, although Google might be able to generate a thumbnail for you from the video file, if the file can be fetched.
  • Can be rendered. The video can't be hidden behind other elements or require complex interaction for the player to appear. Google can sometimes navigate simple interactions (such as a "tap to play" interaction), but this isn't guaranteed.
  • The video must be playable within the page. Outbound links to another video hosting page are not counted as videos, but a link to another page to play the video won't enable indexing on this page.
  • The video must follow the best practices for video files.
  • Provide consistent metadata. You should provide the same title, thumbnail URL, and video URL in all sources (sitemap, HTML tags, meta tags, and structured data) that describe the same video on the same page.
  • A video need not be fetched to be indexed, but a successful fetch makes the video eligible for additional features such as autoplay previews that can significantly improve user engagement.

About video prominence

The "prominence" of a video on the page is an important signal to Google about whether or not the video is considered to be the main content of the page. In a page with multiple videos, a prominent video will typically be chosen ahead of a non-prominent video for indexing.

How Google extracts information about a video

Google tries to determine various metadata about a video, including the title, thumbnail, description, and more, from different places:

  • Google can use structured data (VideoObject), various HTML tags, and video sitemaps to obtain a thumbnail, title, description, and video URL.
  • If Google can fetch and process the video (in a supported video encoding), Google can often extract a thumbnail and preview. Google can also extract some limited meaning from the audio and video of the file.
  • Google can extract title and description information from the page hosting the video, including the page text and meta tags.

Explanation of report values

Page status

An indexed page where Google discovered a video can have one of the following statuses:

  • No video indexed
    Google detected that the page has at least one video on it, but Google could not index any video found for some reason. See Video indexing requirements to learn indexing requirements, or Troubleshooting to learn how to identify and fix the issue. Information about only one video can be shown in the report, even if multiple videos were found.
  • Video indexed
    Google was able to index the page as well as a video on that page. Google indexes only one video per page. Read the Video indexing details to learn more about how Google indexes videos on your site.

Filter by sitemap

You can filter the report to show only page URLs that are present in a selected sitemap. Filtering by sitemap filters all data in the report: the chart, chart totals, issue list, and exports.

When filtering by sitemap, the report shows only indexed page URLs from the selected sitemap where a video was found by Google. The filter ignores the presence or absence of video sitemap tags. Therefore, the resulting URL list omits sitemap URLs that were not indexed, and includes indexed URLs that don't have any video sitemap tags but where a video was found.

You can filter only by sitemaps listed in robots.txt for your site or submitted using the Sitemaps report.

Impressions

You can see how many impressions your video had in Google Search (both the combined results and the video-only search results) as well as in Discover. Results in the Video indexing report are aggregated by page. Use the impression count line in the chart as a general guide rather than an exact count because of the subtleties* in calculating these values.

*Probably more than you want to know: Impression counts shown in the Video Indexing report differ from impression counts in the Performance reports because the Performance reports aggregate impressions differently depending on whether you are filtering by Search Appearance or by Search type, whether you're looking at the chart or table, and so on. Impression totals on the Performance reports are usually lower because some of the data shown there is aggregated by property.

Video indexing errors

The Video Indexing report exposes the following reasons that a video can't be indexed on a page:

Reason Description
Video is not the main content of the page The video is not the main content or primary focus for this page; only videos that are the main content of the page are eligible for indexing. Here are some examples of page types where the video is supplementary to the textual content, and not the primary focus of the page:
  • A blog post where the video is complementary to the text rather than the primary content of the page
  • A product details page with a complementary video
  • A video category page that lists multiple videos of equal prominence
Cannot determine video position and size The video player is not present in the page when loaded. Typically this occurs when the page has an image where the player will appear (often a screenshot or an image of the player) that must be clicked to start playback. To fix, load the video player at its actual size and position when the page is loaded, without requiring any user interaction.
MRSS failure; try using schema.org instead You are using MRSS (media RSS) to describe the video, and Google had a problem processing the description. Try using schema.org markup instead to describe your video.
No thumbnail URL provided

No thumbnail image was specified for this video, and Google was unable to generate one for you. Provide a link to a thumbnail for your video using structured data, a sitemap, or an mRSS file.

If you provided a thumbnail URL using structured data and got this error, check that you are not defining a different thumbnail URL for the same video in an HTML tag. You should provide the same title, thumbnail URL, and video URL in all sources (sitemap, HTML tags, meta tags, and structured data) that describe the same video on the same page.

Unsupported thumbnail format The thumbnail image specified is in an unsupported format, based on the thumbnail file extension. Make sure to use only supported image formats for your thumbnail image, and to specify the proper format extension.
Invalid thumbnail size The thumbnail specified was an invalid size, and Google was unable to generate a thumbnail for you. Provide a thumbnail of a supported size.
Thumbnail blocked by robots.txt The thumbnail provided is blocked to Google by a robots.txt rule. If the image is hosted on another site, contact the site to see how you can unblock your image, or else provide a link to a thumbnail image that can be reached by Google without any login requirements and not blocked by robots.txt rules.
Thumbnail is transparent The thumbnail provided has a transparency level that exceeds the acceptable threshold: at least 80% of the image must have an alpha level above 250. Transparent thumbnails are not allowed for video indexing.
Thumbnail could not be crawled due to hostload Your site seems to be at maximum capacity for Google crawling requests. Google can't access the video thumbnail needed for indexing until your traffic load (as estimated by Google) drops. For more details, read the crawl budget documentation.
Thumbnail could not be reached Google was unable to access the provided thumbnail at the URL provided. (This is not a robots.txt issue.) Perhaps the image is password protected, or no longer exists at the URL provided.
Video not processed Google detected that the page has at least one video on it, but decided not to index the video.
Video not processed yet The video is being processed; check back in a few days to see if processing is complete.
Video not found on host service The specified video is missing from the hosting service, or is on a private hosting service that isn't reachable by Google's crawler. Visit the service using the video ID to confirm, and then update your page with the proper ID or URL for your video hosting service.
Thumbnail is missing or invalid The thumbnail was not provided, not available, or invalid. For technical reasons, the system can't distinguish between these issues. Check that a valid thumbnail URL is provided in a supported format, with an accurate file extension, and that the thumbnail is available to Google.
Invalid thumbnail The thumbnail is invalid for some reason not covered by any other thumbnail error listed here. Confirm that you have specified a thumbnail image, that it's following all the guidelines for thumbnails, and that it is available to Google.

 

Last crawled

The Last crawled date in the issue details page is the last time the page was crawled, not the video was crawled.

Additional details about the selected video

Click a page URL in the report to see additional video indexing information for that page. This information comes from various sources. If there are multiple distinct videos on the page, all information is about the most likely candidate for indexing, whether or not the video was actually indexed.

  • Video URL: The URL of the video file or player. If you see multiple URLs listed for a single video, that means that Google thinks all these URLs are essentially the same video. If you think that these duplicate URLs are actually different videos, you can try to disambiguate them. If Google has found multiple unrelated videos on a page, the additional information shown is associated with the video most eligible for indexing (whether or not it has or can be indexed). A video can be hosted on a different domain and still show details in this report. Read more.
  • Thumbnail URL: URL of the thumbnail for this video. This is either a thumbnail provided by you, or a frame extracted by Google from the video file. If a thumbnail can't be found or generated, then the video can't be indexed.
  • Video placement: Whether or not the host page contains important content in addition to the video. Possible values:
    • Video is main content on the page: The page content is mainly a single video. It doesn't seem to have much additional content.
    • Video is supplementary content on the page: This page hosts meaningful content in addition to the video, such as additional text, graphics, or additional videos.

Source of video details data

Video details come from the following sources:

  • Structured data: The metadata came from schema.org structured data on the page. Typically this is a Video object.
  • Sitemap: Information comes from a video tag in a sitemap.
  • Open Graph Protocol: Information was provided using Open Graph Protocol tags on the page.
  • HTML tag: Information was provided by using one of the many HTML tags that can provide this information, including object tag <embed>, <video>, <link>, <script>, <amp-video> or other 3rd-party-specific AMP video tags for video, or various image tags for thumbnails.
  • mRSS: Information was provided in an mRSS file.
  • Google-rendered screenshot: Google was able to process the video file and generate a thumbnail from the video source.
  • Generated by Google: Google was able to generate this information based on the files and information provided on the page.
  • Provided by video hosting platform: The thumbnail was provided by the video hosting platform.
  • Metadata source unknown: Search Console is unsure which method was used to obtain the information.
  • video tag poster attribute: The thumbnail image link was retrieved from the <video poster="..."> attribute.

About video URLs

Providing a video URL is highly recommended, but is not required to index a video. Providing a video URL can improve indexability of the video and enable additional features such as autoplay previews.

Missing video URL

If Google identifies a page as having a video but cannot find a video URL, you will see N/A for the URL in the report. To fix, provide the video URL in either contentURL or embedURL in the VideoObject markup; in appropriate HTML tags; or in a video sitemap entry.

Multiple URLs for the same video

If you see multiple URLs listed for a single video, that means that Google has found multiple URLs on the page that point to what Google thinks is the same video.

When this happens, Google might combine and use video metadata associated with any duplicate URLs; for example, the title from URL 1, the thumbnail from URL 2, and so on.

If you think the videos are not the same, read how to fix this issue.

Validate your fixes

After you fix all instances of a specific issue on your site, you can ask Google to confirm your fixes. If all known instances are fixed, the issue count goes to zero in the issues table and dropped to the bottom of the table.

Why validate

Telling Google that you have fixed all issues in a specific issue status or category has the following benefits:

  • You'll get an email when Google has confirmed your fix on all URLs, or conversely, if Google has found remaining instances of that issue.
  • You can track Google's progress in confirming your fixes, and see a log of all pages queued for checking, and the fix status of each URL.

It might not always make sense to fix and validate a specific issue on your website: for example, URLs blocked by robots.txt are probably intentionally blocked. Use your judgment when deciding whether to address a given issue.

You can also fix issues without validating; Google updates your instance count whenever it crawls a page with known issues, whether or not you explicitly requested fix validation.

Pro tip: Validate your fixes by sitemap
To speed up a fix request, create and submit a sitemap containing only your most important pages, then filter the report by that sitemap before requesting a fix validation. A validation request against a subset of your affected URLs can complete faster than a request that includes all affected URLs on your site.

Start validation

To tell Search Console that you fixed an issue:

  1. Fix all instances of the issue on your site. If you missed a fix, validation will stop when Google finds a single remaining instance of that issue.
  2. Open the issue details page of the issue that you fixed. Click the issue in the issues list in your report.
    • ⚠️ If you are filtered to a specific sitemap in your report, the validation will apply only to items in the sitemap at the time you requested validation. This might be what you want, or it might not. Just be aware of it.
  3. Click Validate fix. Do not click Validate fix again until validation has succeeded or failed. More details about how Google checks your fixes.
  4. You can monitor the validation progress. Validation typically takes up to about two weeks, but in some cases can take much longer, so please be patient. You will receive a notification when validation succeeds or fails.
  5. If validation fails, you can see which URL caused the validation to fail by clicking See details in the issue details page. Fix this page, confirm your fix on all URLs in Pending state, and restart validation.

When is an issue considered "fixed" for a URL or item?

An issue is marked as fixed for a URL or item when either of the following conditions are met:

  • When the URL is crawled and the issue is no longer found on the page. For an AMP tag error, this can mean that you either fixed the tag or that the tag has been removed (if the tag is not required). During a validation attempt, it will be labeled Passed.
  • If the page is not available to Google for any reason (page removed, marked noindex, requires authentication, and so on), the issue will be considered as fixed for that URL. During a validation attempt, it is categorized in the Other validation state.

Issue lifetime

An issue's lifetime extends from the first time any instance of that issue was detected on your site until 90 days after the last instance was marked as gone from your site. If ninety days pass without any recurrences, the issue is removed from the issues table.

An issue's First detected date is the first time the issue was detected during the issue's lifetime, and does not change. Therefore:

  • If all instances of an issue are fixed, but a new instance of the issue occurs 15 days later, the issue is marked as open, and first detected date remains the original date.
  • If the same issue occurs 91 days after the last instance was fixed, the previous issue was closed, and so this is recorded as a new issue, with the first detected date set to the new detection date.
Validation flow

Here is an overview of the validation process after you click Validate Fix for an issue. This process can take several days or even longer, and you will receive progress notifications by email.

  1. When you click Validate Fix, Search Console immediately checks a few pages.
    • If the current instance exists in any of these pages, validation ends, and the validation state remains unchanged.
    • If the sample pages do not have the current error, validation continues with state Started. If validation finds other unrelated issues, these issues are counted against that other issue type and validation continues.
  2. Search Console works through the list of known URLs affected by this issue. Only URLs with known instances of this issue are queued for recrawling, not the whole site. Search Console keeps a record of all URLs checked in the validation history, which can be reached from the issue details page.
  3. When a URL is checked:
    1. If the issue is not found, the instance validation state changes to Passing. If this is the first instance checked after validation has started, the issue validation state changes to Looking good.
    2. If the URL is no longer reachable, the instance validation state changes to Other (which is not an error state).
    3. If the instance is still present, issue state changes to Failed and validation ends. If this is a new page discovered by normal crawling, it is considered another instance of this existing issue.
  4. When queued URLs have been checked for this issue and found to be fixed of this issue, the issue state changes to Passed. However, even when all instances have been fixed, the severity label of the issue doesn't change (Error or Warning), only the number of affected items (0).

Even if you never click Start validation Google can detect fixed instances of an issue. If Google detects that all instances of an issue have been fixed during its regular crawl, it will change the issue count to 0 on the report.

Revalidation

⚠️ Wait for a validation cycle to complete before requesting another cycle, even if you have fixed some issues during the current cycle.

To restart a failed validation:

  1. Navigate into the validation log for the failed validation: Open to the issue details page of the issue that failed validation and click See details.
  2. Click Start new validation.
  3. Validation will restart for all URLs marked Pending or Failed, plus any new instances of this issue discovered through normal crawling since the last validation attempt. URLs marked Passed or Other are not rechecked.
  4. Validation typically takes up to about two weeks, but in some cases can take much longer, so please be patient.

See validation progress

To see the progress of a current validation request, or the history of the last request if a validation is not in progress:

  1. Open the issue details page for the issue. Click the issue row in the main report page to open the issue details page.
    • The validation request status is shown both in the issue details page and also in the Validation row of the Details table.
  2. Click See details to open the validation details page for that request.
    • The instance status for each URL included in the request is shown in the table.
    • The instance status applies to the specific issue that you are examining. You can have one issue labeled Passed on a page, but other issues labeled Failed, Pending, or Other on the same page.
    • In the AMP report and Page Indexing report, entries in the validation history page are grouped by URL.
    • In the Rich Result reports, items are grouped by the combination of URL + structured data item (as determined by the item's Name value).
Validation request status

The following validation states apply to validation for a given issue:

  • Not started: One or more instances of this issue have never been in a validation request for this issue.
    Next steps:
    1. Click into the issue to learn the details of the error. Inspect the individual pages to see examples of the error on the live page.
    2. Click Learn more on the details page to see the details of the problem.
    3. Click an example URL row in the table to get details on that specific error.
    4. Fix your pages and then click Validate fix to start validationValidation typically takes up to about two weeks, but in some cases can take much longer, so please be patient.
  • Started: You have begun a validation attempt and no remaining instances of the issue have been found yet.
    Next step: Google will send notifications as validation proceeds, telling you what to do, if necessary.
  • Looking good: You started a validation attempt, and all issue instances that have been checked so far have been fixed.
    Next step: Nothing to do, but Google will send notifications as validation proceeds, telling you what to do.
  • Passed: All known instances of the issue are gone (or the affected URL is no longer available). You must have clicked Validate fix to get to this state (if instances disappeared without you requesting validation, state would change to N/A).
    Next step: Nothing more to do.
  • N/A: Google found that the issue was fixed on all URLs, even though you never started a validation attempt.
    Next step: Nothing more to do.
  • Failed: A certain threshold of pages still contain this issue, after you clicked Validate.
    Next steps: Fix the issue and restart validation.
Instance validation status

After validation has been requested, every instance of the issue is assigned one of the following validation states:

  • Pending: Queued for validation. The last time Google looked, this issue instance existed.
  • Passed: [Not available in all reports] Google checked for the issue instance and it no longer exists. Can reach this state only if you explicitly clicked Validate for this issue instance.
  • Failed: Google checked for the issue instance and it's still there. Can reach this state only if you explicitly clicked Validate for this issue instance.
  • Other: [Not available in all reports] Google couldn't reach the URL hosting the instance, or (for structured data) couldn't find the item on the page any more. Considered equivalent to Passed.

Note that the same URL can have different states for different issues; For example, if a single page has both issue X and issue Y, issue X can be in validation state Passed and issue Y on the same page can be in validation state Pending.

Troubleshooting

Overview of troubleshooting

In order to troubleshoot a video indexing problem you must understand these key concepts:

Page indexing
Google must be able to find and index the page that hosts a video. You can test whether a page is (or can be) indexed using the URL Inspection tool. Requirements for page indexing:
  • Google can find the page: either the page is linked from somewhere that Google knows about, or is listed in a sitemap.
  • Google can access the page: The page isn't blocked from indexing with a robots.txt rule, noindex rule, or by requiring a login
  • The page follows all the Google Search essentials: Google won't index a page that violates the spam policies or can't be indexed for technical reasons.
  • The page isn't a duplicate of another page: Google tries to group together any duplicate pages on your site, and will index only one of those pages. If only one of those duplicates has a video, but that is not the indexed page, then Google won't index the video for that page.
Video indexing
Google indexes videos only from indexed pages. Google must be able to find the video on the page and then find sufficient information about the video to index it. On a page with multiple videos, Google will index only one video per page. See Video indexing requirements.
Video fetching
Google tries to fetch the video file as part of video indexing. If the file is blocked to Google (some services block Google from fetching a video) or if the file is in an unsupported format, it won't be fetched. A video need not be fetched to be indexed.

Total video count low / Total page count low

If the total number of Video indexed + No video indexed values is much less than the number of indexed pages with videos on your site, there are two possible reasons:

  • Google could not index the containing page. A video has no chance of being indexed unless it is within a page that is indexed. See Containing page is not indexed.
  • Google could not find any videos on your indexed page. Even if Google indexes the page, if it can't find a video on the page, it won't appear in this report. See Video is not indexed.
Remember: this report does not count total videos on your site. It counts indexed pages where Google detected a video, and from those pages, how many pages where Google was able to index one video (Google never indexes more than one video per page).

Containing page is not indexed

If Google has not indexed a host page, then the host page, and any videos it contains, won't be included in this report.

Alternately, if Google has indexed a page but doesn't see a video on the page, the page won't appear in this report.

You can see a high-level view of how many pages on your site are indexed using the Page Indexing report. See if the number of indexed pages seem right. See if indexing errors apply generally to pages containing videos. Note that the Page Indexing report doesn't provide information on pages that weren't found by Google.

To learn the specifics of why a specific page might not be indexed, use the URL Inspection tool. That tool provides detailed information about whether and why Google can or can't index a page. Some general guidelines:

  • Findability issues: Google must be able to find a page in order to index it. Is the page linked by an already indexed page on your site, or another site? Is the page listed in a sitemap?
  • Indexing issues: The following page indexing issues can be detected by the URL Inspection tool:
    • Page blocked from crawling by robots.txt
    • Page blocked from indexing by a noindex tag or directive
    • Page is not canonical. Google indexes only canonical pages (duplicates of the canonical are not indexed). Although a video won't be indexed from a non-canonical page, if the same video is embedded within another, canonical indexed page, the video can be indexed from this page.

No video found on page

If Google doesn't find any videos on an indexed page, then the page won't appear in this report. (This is different from when Google finds videos on an indexed page but can't index any video. In that case, the page will appear in the report as No video indexed.)

If your page has videos, but when you inspect the page Google does not report any videos, here are some recommendations:

  • Add the page to a sitemap with a video descriptor.
  • Ensure that your video is prominent on the page when viewed in a browser.
  • Ensure that you follow the best practices for videos.
  • Make sure that the hosting page is indexed. Even if a live URL inspection detects a video, a video won't be indexed from a page that isn't indexed.

Google is combining video metadata from different locations

If you see multiple URLs for the same video on a page, this means that Google considers them to be the same video.

In this case, Google might use metadata from any of the duplicate sources--for example, the title from URL1 and the thumbnail from URL2.

If you think that these videos are not the same, here's how to help Google differentiate your videos:

  • Make sure that each video has a unique video and thumbnail URL.
  • If you are using schema.org Video objects, make sure that your Video object URL matches the URL used in HTML tags (<embed>, <video>, or other appropriate tag), sitemaps, and mRSS files.
  • Do not use the same thumbnail for different videos.

Video is not indexed

A video might not be indexed for many reasons, including:

  • The containing page is not indexed. Use the URL Inspection tool to determine if a page is indexed, and if not, why not.
  • The video doesn't follow all the video indexing guidelines.
  • The video isn't findable by Google. Google can't index a video if it can't find it on the page. Does the page require user interaction to see the video? Use the URL Inspection tool to test the live page and look at the screenshot--can you see your video on the page?
  • The video isn't "prominent" on the page, or is less prominent or suitable for indexing than another video on the page. Google only indexes a video if it has a minimum level of prominence on the page, and Google prefers to index the most prominent video on the page.
  • Another video on the page was more suitable for indexing. Use the URL Inspection tool to see if another video on the page was indexed.
  • Google couldn't retrieve the thumbnail supplied or generate a thumbnail. To supply a thumbnail, follow these guidelines. To enable Google to generate a file, see video fetching. You can use the Rich Results Test tool to test for robots.txt blocking:
    • Open the Rich Results test
    • Provide the URL of the thumbnail and click Test URL
    • In the results, expand the Crawl section and check the Crawl allowed? result, which should indicate whether the thumbnail is blocked by a robots.txt rule.
    • If a robots.txt rule is blocking your thumbnail, you'll need to contact whoever owns the file (the webmaster for the site containing the thumbnail) and tell them to unblock your thumbnail file to Google in the robots.txt file.
  • Google couldn't generate required information for the video for some reason (thumbnail and description are required). If the video uses structured data, is the structured data correct? Invalid or missing values for required structured data attributes can prevent a video from being indexed. You can test your video structured data using the Rich Results Test tool.
  • See guidelines for helping Google find your videos.

How to block a page or video from the index

To block a page containing a video from appearing in Search results, add a noindex tag or directive to the containing page. This should also prevent any videos on the page from being indexed in the context of that page. If the videos appear in other, indexed pages, the videos could be indexed there; if the videos don't appear in any other pages on your site, they won't be indexed.

To block only a video from appearing in Search results, you must return a noindex directive in requests for both the video or the thumbnail image (if any) for the video. Simply not returning video bytes for a crawling request won't prevent a video from appearing in Search, since Google can index a video even without a successful fetch of the video file.

Read more advanced blocking or restriction guidelines.

Unanswerable questions

Here are some video statistics that we currently can't supply in Search Console:

  • How many videos on my site has Google indexed?
    Search Console currently doesn't have a report showing the total number of unique indexed videos on a site, only a count of indexed pages containing a video that can or can't be indexed.
  • What videos can/can't Google index?
    Search Console doesn't have a comprehensive report showing all videos that can or cannot be indexed on a site, only pages containing a video that can or cannot be indexed.
  • What page(s) is video X indexed for?
    Search Console doesn't have a way to see all indexed pages associated with a given indexed video.

* Very specific conditions mentioned above means that your site hosts only a single, unique video per page, and Google can index every page that contains a video. In this case, the report will reflect the count of videos on your site. If your site hosts multiple videos per page, or hosts the same video on multiple pages, or Google can't index every page with a video, then the chart totals probably won't show the total number of unique videos indexed on your site.

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