Wistia video rich snippet thumbnail images

[A_Q]

Hi there,

I just wondered if anyone on the forum had experience of using Wistia video rich snippets and how to control the thumbnail image that appears in SERPs?

I have selected a thumbnail with the video information on the Wistia account, but a different one actually appears in the results pages (the image being used doesn't actually appear on the page at all, but it is elsewhere on the site).

Has anyone had anything similar and what did you do the control the thumbnail being used?

Thanks!

[MeganSingley]

Hey EliasAQ!

Have you tried posting your question to Wistia's Community Forum? Wistia has awesome customer service, so they might be able to get an answer to you if you don't get one on here.

Cheers!

[PhilNottingham]

If Google are pulling in a different thumbnail from the one you're stipulating in your Wistia account, there's likely going to be one of two problems.

1. You embedded the video with an SEO embed before updating the thumb. This means that your schema.org mark-up surrounding the video will contradict with the variation of the thumb submitted in your video sitemap. Google may have chosen the default snippet in the schema, so check to see what's included in the source
2. Your open graph tags are referencing a different image. As OG tags are in the head, they're often the ones Google take as the default for video thumbs.

You may alternatively have issues with Google randomly taking another image from your page to populate the video thumb, which I have seen happen a couple of times, but the above two situations are the most common.

I hope that's useful! If you need help solving the problem, give me a shout and I might be able to offer you some one-off consulting.

Phil.

[A_Q]

Thanks for the tips! I'll give them a try & report back!