A couple months ago, Google teased the new video indexing report in Google Search Console. Well now, Google said this report will roll out to some sites “over the next few months.” The tricky part, you may never see it, you would only see it if Google detects videos on your site.
Also, Google’s URL Inspection tool was upgraded to show these coverage issues on video content.
So you won’t know if the report is not showing yet because of the slow rollout or because there is an issue with Google detecting if there are videos on your site.
Again, if Google sees videos on your site, Google will display the new “Video indexing report” on the left navigation bar in the coverage section of Google Search Console. The report shows the status of video indexing on your site. It helps you answer the following questions:
- In how many pages has Google identified a video?
- Which videos were indexed successfully?
- What are the issues preventing videos from being indexed?
Like the old coverage report, if you fix an existing issue, you can use the report to validate the fix and track how your fixed video pages are updated in the Google Search index.
The video indexing report shows how many indexed pages on your site contain one or more videos, and on how many of those pages a video could be indexed. 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 where Google found one or more videos, but could not index any video, and details about 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 blocked or being a non-canonical page) then it won’t appear in this report.
Here is a list of errors the report can show you:
- No prominent videos on page
- Cannot determine video position and size
- Video too large or too small
- MRSS failure; try using schema.org instead
- Invalid video URL
- Unsupported video format
- Unknown video format
- No thumbnail URL provided
- Unsupported thumbnail format
- Invalid thumbnail size
- Thumbnail blocked by robots.txt
- Thumbnail is transparent
- Thumbnail could not be reached
- Video not processed
- Video not processed yet
- Video not found on host service
- Thumbnail is missing or invalid
- Invalid thumbnail
Here is a sample of the report (click to enlarge):
Like I said above, the URL Inspection tool now checks the video indexing status of a specific page. Note, this does not work on the live URL inspection tool, it works on the normal version. When inspecting a page, if Google detected a video on it, you will see the following in the results:
- Details such as the video URL and the thumbnail URL.
- The page status shows whether the video was indexed or not.
- List of issues preventing the video from being indexed.
Here is what that looks like:
Here are more details on this new report from Google.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
