New resources for video SEO

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
  oder noindex metadata.
• Provide structured data with VideoObject markup. 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.

Posted by Danielle Marshak, Product Manager