Google Search Console’s new video indexing report now rolling out

A couple of months ago Google teased a new video indexing report in Google Search Console, that new report is now rolling out, the search company announced. The Video indexing report is rolling out “gradually over the next few months, so you might not see any changes for now,” the company added.

What is the video indexing report. The video indexing report shows how many indexed pages on your site contain one or more videos, and on how many of those pages a video could be indexed. Google said the report can help you understand the performance of your videos on Google, and identify possible areas of improvement.

What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of this report:

When the report shows. Google said if Google detects videos on your site, the Video indexing report will appear on the left navigation bar in the coverage section. If Google has not detected a video on your website, you will not see the report.

What it tells you. The report shows the status of video indexing on your site. It helps you answer the following questions:

• In how many pages has Google identified a video?
• Which videos were indexed successfully?
• What are the issues preventing videos from being indexed?

In addition, if you fix an existing issue, you can use the report to validate the fix and track how your fixed video pages are updated in the Google index, Google explained.

URL Inspection tool for video pages. Google also also enhanced the URL Inspection tool to allow you to check the video indexing status of a specific page. When inspecting a page, if Google detected a video in it, you will see the following in the results:

• Details such as the video URL and the thumbnail URL.
• The page status showing whether the video was indexed or not.
• List of issues preventing the video from being indexed.

Please note, this does not work for the live URL inspection feature.

What The video URL inspection looks like. Here is what this looks like:

Why we care. If you host videos on your site or embed videos on your site, you will want to check out this report to see if there are ways to improve those videos or help other videos to show up in Google Search. Videos are an important aspect of search traffic and visibility in Google Search.

There are a lot more details on this new report in this Google help document.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.