Did adding product videos cause my products to lose #1 position?

[EugeneF]

As someone who is getting close to adding several thousand videos to product pages...... I now have a new concern.   I would love to see an expanded topic / research on this.

[PhilNottingham]

So, I think it's entirely feasible that Google have chosen to rank you lower in the page, but with a video rich snippet - but it may not be the case at all, you may have just lost rankings due to an algorithm update.

Video results are often given position 3 in the SERPs, but i've seen them appear elsewhere too. If there are a number of video results for a term which suggests a video result would be the best return i.e: "Tutorial", then these results can rank in the top positions.

However, the question i would be interested to hear the answer to is "Have you lost traffic?". Video rich snippets in position three often have a higher click through rate than the top result. If you've got lots of nice rich snippets (albeit with lower ranking), but are maintaining or growing your traffic - then clearly you're in a better position than you were before.

Google may also choose to not rank video results if it feels like videos are not appropriate for the search query. It's not always consistent with this, which is why you may have got some of your products getting the rich snippets, but not others.

What wont happen is that you receive a main listing and a second video snippet result for the same page. Video results are basically page results, but with extra metadata to indicate that there is a video on the page.

If this has caused you to lose traffic, then you could try putting the videos on a different page (with supporting text and content) for each product - and optimise those pages for longer tail keywords around your product, while letting the main product page rank for the head term. I wouldn't really recommend that though, as it will spread your link equity thinner and seems somewhat superfluous.

[Ecreativeworks]

I have seen this happen, specifically when the video is self-hosted. Obviously the way to test if it's really the video and not the algorithm in your case is to remove the video and see how the SERPs shake out. If you're #1 position returns, then you know for certain (but I think it's very likely that the video is at fault).

The only real way around this I've found (without doing duplicate pages) is to use YouTube to host your videos, optimize them on YouTube and embed the YouTube video. The YouTube video will rank entirely separately from your site -- but of course clicks on the result will take you to YouTube and not your site, though you can toss a link to your site at the very top of the YouTube description.

[PhilNottingham]

Hi Julie,

I would sincerely advise against that approach for product videos. See my recent post on the topic. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

Self-hosting will have nothing to do with Google's choice of position for the ranking.

[EGOL]

Right... when we lost a #1 position to a universal search result our video was hosted on youtube but embedded on our webpage.  The clicks went to our website.

Phil... great info in that blog post..  Now I know who to listen to about video.  Thanks!

[Ecreativeworks]

Mmmm, I didn't see anything in that article that addressed the possibility of self-hosted hurting your ranking -- though I'd love to see any research done on the topic if you have references.

I'll be the first to admit I don't have good research or testing, but my anecdotal experience is the same as several posters above: a page is ranking well, and the addition of a self-hosted video targeting the same keywords results in a video listing that is lower in the SERPs replacing the original page listing. Removing the video causes the page to bounce back up to its original, higher, ranking. It seems that for many searches Google does not want to deliver a video result up at the top.

Another concern that I have with self-hosting videos is if the search is for a product, a large number of searchers don't want to watch a video, they want to buy something (and of course some want the video). But the ones looking to just buy may skip the video result in favor of what looks more like a shopping page result -- which is another reason why unless it's a truly video-oriented search or linkbait, I prefer to go to YouTube and go for multiple rankings.

[WebstaurantStore.com]

Thanks for the input, everyone.

I'm doing an informal experiment to test this theory. It's not perfectly controlled, but I think it will still be helpful.

I compiled a list product pages that I think are showing up lower in the SERP's because of having self-hosted videos.

Recorded the rankings of those pages (non-personalized) for the keywords we're targeting and then asked our content department to take down the videos on those pages.

I'll follow up in a week or two once Google recrawls those pages to see if the rankings have changed.

[EugeneF]

We have experiments up and running with youtube, wistia, and vimeopro.

So far we only see the youtube video's are indexed.  (they indexed in just a few hours).

At this time, the youtube are NOT imbedded.  In one case, it took the first position, in another, it took #3.   Our related web page is still showing on the first page.

We will monitor and see what results we have over the next week.  Curious to see what the imbeds do.

[PhilNottingham]

I have tested this extensively and can confirm that your choice of hosting for the video has no bearing at all on the ranking. Videos are indexed as components of a pagetype, agnostic of the provider. Video results are often given specific places, often third, and a first place result indexed with a video may drop places to fit the aesthetic model.

Google are continually shifting this, so the results will likely fluctuate - with and without rich snippets for a variety of terms.

Extensive testing also indicates that a video result in third typically gets more clicks that first place. Meaning a video result in third is ultimately than a first place result. While your ranking may drop, your traffic will rise. That's not necessarily going to be true across the board, but is a general trend.

YouTube is a poor choice for product videos, as you can't secure them and they will normally perform very poorly in Google organic and YouTube search. YouTube is however, a great choice for videos which are otherwise entertaining or informative.

Google are pretty good at working out when people like video results and when they prefer more generic shopping results and are getting better and better all the time. If users don't click on the video results - then it won't be long before those rich snippets are changed for a more appropriate form.

[WebstaurantStore.com]

Thanks for the reply, Phil.

I'm not testing whether my choice of hosting effects rankings.

I'm trying to confirm that by adding a video to our product pages, we may have been pushed down lower in the SERP's to fit Google's "aesthetic model."

Whether or not that results in more or less clicks is a separate issue... but definitely the next step.

[PhilNottingham]

Thanks Charlie,

Regarding the hosting, i was actually responding to Julie Heltunen who expressed concern that this may be a factor.

I think the click through rate is actually the integral issue here. The goal of SEO is improving traffic through organic search. If third place with a video snippet in a SERP is giving you more referring traffic than a first place ranking previously was - then despite being third place, your new result is better "optimised" than your previous situation. There would be no point being first place, if everybody is clicking on result three. Especially with the increase in personalised search, we need to stop thinking that "higher up = better" and really start drilling down into the data to see what is working for us. If you've been pushed down to three, but it's working for you - then third place is where it's at.

[nixforsix]

I understand your concern, and the same thing has happened to us. But, the real question is, how has your traffic for those search terms been affected?  Are you getting less traffic now that you have  a video snippet show up in the third result as opposed to the plain text 1st result?

We've actually received higher CTRs with our snippet results.  As long as the snippet is generally above the fold. You need to weigh the actual affect of the snippet on your traffic and not just the vanity of a ranking position.

[viventuraSEO]

This same thing is happening to me right now. I have two projects: One in English and one in German and they are getting totally different results.

I have pretty much tried with everything: wistia, vimeo and dailymotion I got all of the videos on my sitemap BUT they were indexed in different times: first two of them and then the last one. I have noticed that sometimes Google shows the video snippets and sometimes its ignored.

The rankings for those keywords are being also very unestable.  I tried  also to put flash videos on my German language project and they also got indexed because I put them on my video sitemap but now in this precise moment I was testing if putting a video for a page that was on first position could get a higher CTR with the video snippet but guess what... currently my #1 ranking position is now out of the 100 positions. CHAOS!

I guess at this moment Google is trying to figure out whether to show up or not a video snippet and our page for a keyword in a language where there were never a video snippet. SO Confusing! Also found out that your rankings definitely drop when they were at the top 3 positions even they can drop to the second or third page but at this moment they are trying to get their past position. I will have to keep a big eye on this.

If you guys got more insight and ideas for me to get my video snippets with more stability let me know!

P.S in case you want to check my keyword and URL that was #1 and dropped out of the 100 results its the German word "Peru Reisen" my page is http://www.viventura.de/reisen/peru

Thanks