If you use rich snippets to markup your videos, you may want to double check that Google is still showing them. Reports indicate a huge reduction – with estimates as high as 44 percent – in the number of video snippets from Google’s search results.
SEER Interactive was first to report the drop. They shared a screenshot for [iphone 5 review video], comparing July 11 search results (10 videos from 10 different domains) to those on July 16 (5 videos from 3 different domains):
Mozcast also indicated a 28 percent drop in video thumbnails:
Large sites such as the New York Times, Boston.com, Zappos, and Amazon have been impacted. According to Wistia, these are a few of the sites that have survived the changes:
- YouTube
- Vimeo
- Vevo.com
- TED
- Today
- Discovery
- Hulu
- EllenTV.com
- HGTV
- National Geographic
- KIRO TV
SEOlytics also compared 10,000 U.S. video results from July 16 to 17, and found 44 percent less video snippets in Google’s search results. Google-owned YouTube (74.8 percent) had the largest share of video snippets:
Organic search rankings don’t seem to be impacted by the change, so this may be more of a cosmetic change than an algorithmic one. This follows Google’s recent move to remove author images from search results, and has led to speculation that video thumbnails may eventually be eliminated from the search results.
I reached out to Google, and a spokesman said simply that, “We’ll continue to show video snippets where it’s most relevant.”
Separately, Google’s John Mueller wrote on Google+: “We’re still showing video snippets, seeing changes from time to time is normal.”