How to delete video rich snippets?

[SEO_ACSI]

Hi mozzaholics,

At first I was very happy to have video snippets appear in Google (200 pages), but now after 6 months I see a drop of almost -30% in traffic, whilst the average rank stayed the same, compared to the star snippets I have for other pages.

So I want to remove the video snippets and have the old rich snippets back. I tried removing the videositemap and google's the structured data tool doesn't show video snippets.

Does anybody know what else I can do to remove the video snippets? Is there anybody who succeeded deleting them? Please share your wisdom.

Ivo

[NoisyLittleMonkey]

What have you used to put them in place in the first place? HTML, PHP, WordPress?

If I'm understand the question correctly if should just be a case of removing the rich snippets that are around your video information?

[SEO_ACSI]

Thanks for answering. It's HTML

with a ref to Youtube. There is no rich snippet info surrounding it. The video sitemap did the trick. So removing the video sitemap seems the first step.

[Socialrocketco]

Was the issue that it was sending the traffic to youtube instead of your site? If that's the case have you considered a backlink friendly hosted video solution(Wistia is the onlu one I know).

I'm really curious about this particular scenario.

[SEO_ACSI]

No the traffic went to our own website, but the CTR dropped after the video snippets appeared. So we want to go back to star rich snippets.

[PhilNottingham]

Hi Ivo,

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think you're really going to struggle to get those snippets removed, especially since you've used YouTube embeds.

It seems that right now, once a video is indexed, it's very hard to get that snippet removed. You can get a difference video snippet indexed for the page, but Google don't seem to refresh the index regularly or re-crawl pages to determine whether the video attribution is still relevant that often either.

In instances where I have managed to get snippets removed, it's often taken months and there doesn't seem to be a huge level of consistency I can point to.

That said, here are my recommendations:

• Submit a new video sitemap with the appropriate pages taken out (don't just remove the old one)
• Take the videos off the page (and you probably want them off YouTube as well in your case).
• Ensure you don't have FB open graph tags or schema tags related to the video on the page.
• Once you've done all this, resubmit the page to GWMT and then hope for the best!

[SEO_ACSI]

Hi Phil,

Thanks for your extensive answer. I saw your response before, when looking in to this problem, here on moz (loved your video btw) and elsewhere. It's too bad there isn't a guideline by Google we can follow.

I did remove the videositemap, but since these are the only video's on the site. I did not resubmit it. Do you recommend resubmitting an empty one (bit weird though)?

I can't take them off the website since it is high season in my industry and the video's do have added value to the visitor. I guess it's just not something he or she is expecting when looking (googling) for our product.

[PhilNottingham]

Are you looking to remove every single video snippet? Or just the snippets from some pages? It seems fairly drastic to remove every one, so I'd suggest you  delve a bit deeper and work out exactly which pages you don't want the snippet on any more. That way, you can submit a sitemap with some URLs, but not all.

Additionally, note that it's much easier to get the thumbnail changed than the snippet removed entirely, could you try split testing thumbnails to see if it's just suboptimal pictures that are causing you problems here, rather than the snippets as a whole?

If you can't take the videos down, I honestly think you'll struggle to get the snippets removed. Google are not on your side here unfortunately.