My wistia videos are not being index by Google. Does anyone know what can be happening?

[PhilNottingham]

Are you able to share the site in question?

I'll happily take a look into it for you.

[bedbugsupply]

Hello Phil,

Thank you for your time. I watched all your videos on this subject and I can't find what is causing the issue.

This is one of my product pages that have the wistia video embed.

http://goo.gl/H0Ihzv

I have the wistia site map on my robots.txt file and I also manually submit one to google webmaster tools.

It's been a week since I submitted my video site map, there are no errors, but only the URL's were indexed, none of the videos.

Our goal is to display the video thumbnail on the search results next to our product pages.

thank you!

Michelle

[bedbugsupply]

hello Erica,

Thank you for your answer.

I already watched all the videos I could find on the subject including videos from Wistia, Distilled and MOZ blog and It seems like I did everything the way I am supposed to.

This is one of my product pages that have the wistia video embed.

http://goo.gl/H0Ihzv

I have the wistia site map on my robots.txt file and I also manually submit one to google webmaster tools.

It's been a week since I submitted my video site map, there are no errors, but only the URL's were indexed, none of the videos.

Our goal is to display the video thumbnail on the search results next to our product pages.

thank you!

Michelle

[PhilNottingham]

Hi Michelle,

So - firstly, a week is not enough time to determine whether there is a problem with indexation. Videos can take weeks and even months to get indexed, even with all the appropriate mark-up applied, and so I'd recommended at least holding fire for a few more weeks before being too concerned.

However... there are quite a few things on the page in question which could confuse Googlebot and therefore pose problems for you. Firstly, you've embedded the same video twice on the page - once in a lightbox behind a JavaScript Trigger, and then once just embedded into the page. It's hard to know whether Google will be able to execute that JavaScript successfully, but it's highly possible this double embed could confuse Googlebot (and confuse users!). Is there any particular reason why you've embedded the video twice? Secondly, you've also embedded a load of YouTube videos at the bottom of the page. YouTube videos get indexed on the pages they're embedded on instantly, but don't often rank with rich snippets in the blended organic results. This is also a fairly confusing signal to Googlebot, where the "one video per page" model still seems to be the most effective way of getting everything indexed correctly.

I hope that's useful!

Phil

[bedbugsupply]

Hello Phil,

Very helpful answer! Thank you.

We have some pages where we only have one video per page, just like you mentioned. For example: http://goo.gl/PX6X6E

We are trying different things in different pages to see if googlebot likes a specific scenario.

We saw some sites where the video was indexed and it was showing on google search and they were using the lightbox, that's why we decided to try that as well. We were wondering if the position of the video on the page had anything to do with the index success. Since a lot of our videos are being embed after the fold.

I guess, if googlebot likes the "one video per page" those pages with only one video should be indexed. We'll see! I'll wait a little longer.

Thank you!

Michelle

[PhilNottingham]

Videos using a lightbox will sometimes get indexed - it really depends on whether or not Google manage to execute the JS - and this really depends on the whole site architecture. It might be an issue for you, it might not.

My gut is that the main issue at this stage is just time, so I'd definitely give it a few more weeks before taking any further action.

From personal experience, I would be extremely surprised if the position of the video has anything to do with it - "the fold" is a much less concretely defined concept than it once was and your videos are perfectly prominent on the page.

[bedbugsupply]

Thank you very much! Your help was much appreciated!!

Let the "waiting period" begin

Thanks

Michelle

[visunl8752]

Another suggestion...

Being a huge fan of Wistia, there directions do clearly say, one video per page. So this is what we do. We have a video on one page with ONLY the video transcript. We give google the url to this page only. For the videos where our shoppers view, like our product pages, etc, we use the thumbnail with popup, this way it keeps the consumer on the page were they can purchase.

Also dont be afraid to email the wistia support, they are fantastic. Good luck!

Cathy

[PhilNottingham]

You're most welcome!

[tbanwart]

Hi Phil,

I've always appreciated reading your comments to others but I wanted to reach out to you with a question.

We are having a similar issue with our Wistia video's not being indexed (it's been several months).  The funny thing is that our videos, which are hosted by Wistia, used to be indexed before we launched our responsive design site upgrade.  The older version had the video near the top of the page, but it was under a "tab".  The new version, the video is down a lot farther (to make room for our product options), but it is no longer in a tab.  http://www.hairbowcenter.com/ribbon/grosgrain-ribbon/hbc-solid-grosgrain-ribbon/browse-by-width-hbc-grosgrain/3-grosgrain-ribbon-solid-hbc-75mm.html

We noticed that the video's themselves do show up when you view the page as google.  If you look at the cached page, the video is there along with the closed captioning.

We have had several opinions as to what could cause the issue:

1)  Video is too far down on the page.  We are not quite sure how to fix this as it would further push down our products and this is primarily a e-commerce page

2)  Video sitemap is hosted at Wistia:  I"m not sure if this would matter as it seems to work for everyone else and it used to work for us.  We have a roboxt.txt file pointing to Wistia.

If you have any thoughts on what the issue might be, I'd love to hear them.Thanks

[PhilNottingham]

Hi,

The video being too far down the page might be an issue. I've seen this cause problems before, and in your case I think it could be a problem. More broadly though, I don't think you should have those videos on the category pages, because the video itself is just image slideshow and actually does more to hamper the using experience rather than help it. As rich snippets aren't common any more, I don't think you're going to get much value from having these videos on those pages.

Having the sitemap hosted at Wistia isn't a problem. You can point to a sitemap hosted on any site.

Other likely problems are duplicate content. You seem to have significant duplicate content issues as I'm seeing about 3 variations of that page indexed.

Hope that's useful,

Phil.