Slide show showing up as video in serp

[NetvantageMarketing]

Saw an interesting SERP today that made me wonder how this is working -

A search for alaska train tours reveals the Flash slideshow from this page http://www.alaskatours.com/alaska_railroad_packages/alaska_family_tour.htm showing up on the second/third pages.

I'm guessing this is the work of a video sitemap perhaps? Unsure how they pulled this off exactly, but I am very interested to see what people think as I could probably use this for a few different sites.

[NakulGoyal]

Yes, a video sitemap helps generate video SERPS but I have seen video snippets happen without any sitemaps as well. The sitemap will definitely make it easier for Google to display the snippet.

[PhilNottingham]

So - i don't think this site has a video sitemap - though that could be helping. A lot of videos are implemented in flash and Google have recently begun crawling more and more flash files and indexing them as videos. Google can't see past the flash code - which includes <param name="movie" indicating="" that="" the="" file="" is="" essentially="" a="" video.<="" span="">

Whether the content is a slideshow rather than a video is more a semantic than a technical issue - as it's technically identical to a normal flash video. The video rich snippet it receives are essentially relevant.

If you have lots of flash image sequences implemented across sites - then i would encourage you to treat them as videos and use the movie schema markup- as well as creating and submitting a video sitemap.

You won't always get the video rich snippet results for the content - but it can't hurt to provide the engines with more metadata and information.