Hi, my name's Danielle,
and I'm a product manager for video on Google.
I'm here to share some best practices
to help your videos appear in Google Search and Discover.
In today's Lightning Talk, we'll cover how Google indexes videos,
some example features where videos appear on Google,
and what you can do to optimize your videos for these features.
So let's get started.
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Search engines like Google
index videos from millions of sites across the web,
covering topics from news and sports to shopping and education.
These sites include individual publishers
as well as large platforms.
Wherever videos live, we want to help people
find the most relevant videos for their searches and interests.
Google's mission is to organize the world's information
and make it universally accessible and useful.
We aim to deeply understand videos
from diverse sources across the web
so we can help users efficiently find what they're looking for.
So how does Google find and index all these videos?
First, it's worth clarifying
that when we talk about indexing a video
or displaying a video result in search,
we really mean the combination
of that video and the web page where it lives.
As Google crawls the web,
we identify videos on web pages using a variety of signals.
These include data on the page, like video HTML tags
and structured markup,
and data submitted separately, like video sitemaps.
When Google identifies a video on a page,
we try to understand what the video is about
so it can surface to users who are looking for that topic.
Some of this information comes from text on the page,
such as the page title, headings, and captions near the video,
or from signals on other pages, like referral links.
As we'll discuss later, Google can also understand videos
using structured data markup
and by fetching the underlying video file
to analyze its audio and visual content.
Now that you have an overview of how Google indexes videos,
let's talk about some of the places where videos can appear.
As you've probably seen, videos can appear
in the main search results page on Google.
They can also appear in the video search tab
and in the image search tab.
You may also see videos in Discover,
which shows content related to your interests.
Let's talk a bit more about some of the video features you'll see
in the main search results page.
Videos are often grouped together
as you can see in these examples on mobile and desktop.
These features show results
where a video is the main content on the page
as identified by Google classifiers.
On the other hand, for pages that mix videos and text,
you might see results like these.
There are also features like this example
for pages that show multiple videos in a series or playlist.
In addition to basic video information
like the thumbnail, title and duration,
some video results show additional information,
like a badge to indicate that a video is a live stream
or key moments within the video.
These are just a few examples of features on Google
where videos from any site can appear
to give you a sense of how videos from your site might be displayed.
By following a few best practices,
you can make your videos eligible for these features,
offering a more engaging visual result preview
that will help users more easily find your content.
Here are five recommendations to optimize your videos
for Google Search and Discover.
First, make sure your videos are available publicly on the web.
If your videos are part of an app,
make sure each video also has a corresponding web page
with a URL that Google can access.
The video should be easily visible on the page
and should not require complex user actions to load.
Second, to help Google find your videos
and understand what they're about,
you can provide structured data using
This markup can include information
like the video title, description, and duration,
thumbnail and video content file URLs,
and more.
You can use additional structured data to enable features
like the LIVE video badge and video key moments.
Third, make sure you provide a high-quality thumbnail
at a URL that Google can access.
If a thumbnail isn't accessible,
then your page might not be able to appear in video features.
For example, if the thumbnail URL is blocked with robots.txt,
Google won't be able to access that thumbnail.
Fourth, video sitemaps are another way to help Google find videos
associated with pages on your site,
and they can also include metadata tags
to help Google understand what the videos are about.
And finally, fifth, to further optimize your videos,
make sure that Google can fetch your video content files.
Our developer docs lists the supported file formats for videos
along with tips to make sure Google
can access these video content URLs.
When Google can access the visual and audio content
in your video files,
you get several benefits.
First, Google can choose a few seconds from your video
to use as a preview,
which can be more engaging than a static thumbnail.
You can use the
to control the length of these previews.
Second, Google can understand the content of your videos
so they can surface for more relevant queries.
And third, Google can automatically identify key moments
within your video
so users can navigate them like chapters in a book.
To recap, make sure you follow these best practices
to help people find your videos on Google:
make your videos available on the web;
provide structured data with
include high-quality thumbnails;
submit a video sitemap;
and finally, make video content files accessible.
For more detail on these best practices
plus additional tips for optimizing your videos,
check out our developer documentation at the links below.
Thanks for taking the time to watch this video,
and we can't wait to see videos from your site on Google.
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