Recently, Google’s Dikla Cohen gave a presentation on video indexing, which explains that video indexing does not rely on where and how you host your videos. You can host them yourself or choose from the most popular video hosting platforms and services.
With this, he announced that Google is soon launching a new set of reports and tools in Search Console to make video indexing easier to track and diagnose.
With this new launch, the Video Page Indexing report will show a summary of all the pages Google’s systems find with a video while crawling and indexing your website. At a glance, you can see how many video landing pages were indexed.
Issues will be grouped with a trend line and counts of the affected videos. For example, which videos are missing a thumbnail URL, with reasons – the largest impact ranked on top.
You can click on one of the rows to get more details, such as affected video page URLs. You can also download the list of examples and double-check them. This way, you can narrow down the details and understand what is happening and how to resolve issues.
Once your website is updated and you think you have resolved the issue you were facing, you can go back to the Video Indexing Report. Go to that specific issue type, then use the validate fix button to inform Google.
This way, you can initiate recrawling for known URLs affected by the issue. As the pages are being reprocessed, you will be notified if everything is resolved or if there are remaining issues. But, you will have to note that it can take some time to go through all the URLs.
If you wish to check the video indexing status, you can get there by entering the URL of the video landing page at the top of the search console. It will first show you the current status of that URL, as well as the video index status of the page.
It will inform you whether Google has detected a video on the page. If so, you can tell if they managed to index it. If a detected video is not indexed, it will list the reasons preventing it from being indexed.
Please note that Google indexes only one video per page, even when a page has multiple videos.
To summarise, with the new tools:
- You will be able to see how many video landing pages Google has discovered and how many of them were indexed.
- Examine the reasons for unindexed videos on video landing pages.
- You can use the list of affected video page URLs to debug and fix issues.
- You can use the Validate Fix button to initiate recrawling of known URLs affected by the issue.
- You will be able to check the video indexing status of a specific video using the URL inspection tool.
