Strange issue with video search results...

[WillQ]

Hi all,

Got a bit of a weird problem that I can't work out.

I've got a page that contains a video. The SERP for one keyword has the video appearing directly in the search listing like a video rich snippet / schema.

Do not want.

This rich snippet style video result only appears when the page is found for this one keyword, and no other.

How do I stop google displaying the page like this? Why is it only displayed like this for one keyword and no others?

The video is a YouTube video and is embedded in the page. Nothing fancy is going on with the code.

Any ideas? I'm stumped.

[JamesNorquay]

Hi I have been seeing it a bit too recently for Youtube videos and also non youtube.

Quickest way to remove it imo would be to remove the video embed from the page.

Also do you have this page in a video sitemap? Possibly remove the link from the video sitemap.

[WillQ]

No, there's no video sitemap. Assume the video can't be removed because of branding stuff.

It's really weird that it's only for this one search term too... Just can't work it out.

Only solution I can come up with is to put the video embed in an i frame. That'd keep everything looking the same to users but it would cost a lot more to implement than a slight tweak in htaccess / GWT / robots.txt. Gah.

Cheers for the response though!

[MikeGracia]

Not sure why you wouldn't want the video embed to show, but either way, I would recommend having a read (for research) of this (old) thread: http://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/images--video-content/poyHScMu4sk

(although he says he still has the problem, it does look to me like he may have made a case-sensitivity error in his robots.txt file, although not 100% if that would stop

and also this: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/crawlers

In theory, I think you should be able to do this.

See the page here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag

Specifically this tag:

So, I wonder if the following would work:

In theory, I wonder if you can perhaps block the video specific bot from crawling the pages via a robots.txt entry, like:

user-agent: Googlebot-Video
Disallow: /

But maybe the html version would give you more flexibility.

Personally, I would always test this (the meta name version, above) first on a new/dummy page.

Research this really well first though, as mistakes with robots Disallow rules can be costly!.

[PhilNottingham]

Hey Will,

This sounds like an interesting problem! I'd be happy to look into it fully for you if you're willing to share the URL of the page and the keywords returning the video results?

If you don't want to share it publicly, then feel free to PM/email me and i'll take a look.

Cheers,

Phil