How Do You Remove Video Thumbnails From Google Search Result Pages?

[SharieBags]

This is going to be a long question, but, in a nutshell, I am asking if anyone knows how to remove video thumbnails from Google's search result pages?

We have had video thumbnails show up next to many of our organic listings in Google's search result pages for several months.  To be clear, these are organic listings for our site, not results from performing a video search.  When you click on the thumbnail or our listing title, you go to the same page on our site - a list of products or the product page.

Although it was initially believed that these thumbnails drew the eye to our listings and that we would receive more traffic, we are actually seeing severe year over year declines in traffic to our category pages with thumbnails vs. category pages without thumbnails (where average rank remained relatively constant).

We believe this decline is due to several things:

• An old date stamp that makes our listing look outdated (despite the fact that we can prove Google has spidered and updated their cache of these pages as recent as 2 days ago).  We have no idea where Google is getting this datestamp from.
• An unrelated thumbnail to the page title, etc. - sometimes a picture of a man's face when the category is for women's handbags
• A difference in intent - user intends to shop or browse, not watch a video.  They skip our listing because it looks like a video even though both the thumbnail and our listing click through to a category page of products.

So we want to remove these video thumbnails from Google's search results without removing our pages from the index.  Does anyone know how to do this?

We believed that this connection between category page and video was happening in our video sitemap.  We have removed all reference to video and category pages in the sitemap.  After making this change and resubmitting the sitemap in Webmaster Tools, we have not seen any changes in the search results (it's been over 2 weeks).

I've been reading and it appears many believe that Google can identify video embedded in pages.  That makes sense.  We can certainly remove videos from our category pages to truly remove the connection between category page URL and video thumbnail.  However, I don't believe this is enough because in some cases you can find video thumbnails next to listings where the page has not had a video thumbnail in months (example: search for "leather handbags" and find www.ebags.com/category/handbags/m/leather - that video does not exist on that page and has not for months.  Similarly, do a search for "handbags" and find www.ebags.com/department/handbags.  That video has not been on that page since 2010.

Any ideas?

[DomainUltra]

Hi ShariSEO,

So, I found this by heading over to Google Webmaster Tools:

• http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156442

Have look down this page and find the section that talks about, "Create high-quality thumbnail images".  I'm curious if you are able to update a new thumbnail, to replace any "auto-populated" thumbnail that Google is auto-inserting for you.

Also, you might just be missing some simple metadata, within a video sitemap, to define what Google needs (metadata), to update your thumbnail.  Are you using metadata for your videos?

• http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472

Lastly, Danny Dover mentions Thumbnails in this video, around the 7:34 mark, but you might want to listen to the entire video, because he gives some nice tips, regarding video embedding and how to tell YouTube to act upon the sitemap and metadata.

• http://moz.com/blog/video-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday-11080

I hope this was helpful!

[PhilNottingham]

Hi Shari,

This is a really interesting situation and, to be honest, I haven't seen anything quick like it before. All of the on-page information indicates that Google should not be indexing the pages you referenced with video snippets - yet, they are and with extremely unusual choices of thumbnail (the low quality of most of the thumbs would be my guess for the reason you've seen such a drop).

Therefore, my assessment, as you intimated, is that there were strange errors going on with the video sitemap that were attributing certain pages with videos and thumbnails not actually present on the page. If you've now fixed all of that in the sitemap (you seem to have have done), then in theory the snippets should fix themselves upon re-indexation, but I would expect this to take longer than two weeks in the majority of cases. From what I've observed, Google sort of treat their video index as slightly different to their general page index and so simply recrawling a page does not guarantee that the video sitemap entry has been reindexed.

So, my recommended action for you would be to wait it out for another 6 weeks or so and see if anything shifts. If not, drop me a private message and I'll happily look into this a bit further for you, mostly because it's a really interesting case and I'd like to work out what's going on.

In terms of fixing pages where you would like to keep the video present, but not have the video indexed - you can either remove the video sitemap entry for that page, or adjust the sitemap entry to include a more eye-catching and interesting thumbnail. You shouldn't need to remove the videos from the page, since you haven't implemented Schema mark-up or open graph tags on your videos - both of which can assist with indexation.

However, if none of the above works, then another plausible explanation for your situation may be that Google are trying to execute and index some of your JavaScript used in the side bar to serve the videos and in the process are getting very confused as to which page which video should be attributed to. If this is the case, you would need to look at a fundamental restructuring of the way you include video on your pages.

Please keep me updated with regards to the situation!

Thanks,

Phil.

[SharieBags]

Thanks Phil.  Unfortunately we have not seen any changes since removing video entries in our sitemap associated with list (category) pages.

For the two examples above (the videos associated with www.ebags.com/category/handbags/m/leather and www.ebags.com/department/handbags), I even went so far as to deactivate the video entirely in our video provider and I verified that these videos are not in our YouTube channel.

This is really baffling.