Google recently made an announcement on their Search Central pages regarding a change in how videos are displayed in search results. The change is aimed at reducing the number of videos shown in search results for certain conditions. The change specifically affects video thumbnails that appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Google has announced an update aimed at improving user experience by displaying video thumbnails only for search results where the video is the primary content of a webpage. The purpose of this update is to provide users with a clearer understanding of the content they can expect to find on a webpage. Previously, two conditions triggered videos to show in the SERPs when the video appeared on a webpage.
The first scenario is when a video is part of the main content of the page. If the video serves as the primary content of a webpage, Google will continue to display a video thumbnail within the SERPs. The second scenario is when the video that appears on a webpage is not part of the main content of the page. A video thumbnail will no longer appear within the SERPs for this particular scenario.
According to Google’s latest guidance, their experiments have indicated that publishers were minimally affected in terms of the overall engagement. However, this update will cause changes in the video performance reports shown in Google Search Console. The performance report within Search Console, which tracks search appearance metrics for videos, will be impacted by this update. Additionally, both the video indexing report and the video enhancements report and the video enhancements report will feature annotations related to the update.