Topic - Online Video & thumbnails
YouTube Non-Profits Get Cool New Features
Those lucky dogs, first no taxes, now new features at YouTube what’s next? Free candy and beer on Sundays?
Links Matter for Universal Search Video Rankings
One of the tips that I gave in my last post was to add video to pages that may already be ranked high in Google for a particular keyword (excluding your home page), and to then submit a video sitemap to Google. The reason for this, aside from the importance of adding engaging content to your site, is that by doing so, you may be able to gain a universal search ranking for that search term or a blended organic search result with a thumbnail. I mention this because I have seen it work. That being said, Google’s Matt Cutts confirms one piece of the puzzle as to why this can work.
Video Thumbnails in Universal Search – Google Confirms They Work
Last week, on the official Google Blog, they revealed a new set of eye-tracking studies that confirm what many have concluded already. In particular, that video results shown with thumbnails in Google’s universal search results do do NOT distract significantly from the user’s experience and actually DO help to “make it easier” for users to find results.
Below is the first video released by Google that shows an example of an eye-tracking study, in real-time on a universal search results page for the infamous example query, “How to tie a tie”:
RIP Google Video Uploads – Get Your Sitemaps Ready
Yesterday, Google finally announced that they are shutting down the ability for users to upload videos to Google Video “in a few months”. I say finally because many of us expected this to happen for some time and given the efforts spent on enhancements to YouTube, it only makes sense that Google keeps Youtube as the source for uploading video.
Reel Success with Video Thumbails in Google Universal Search
UPDATE – So, looks like Google is still playing with letting other sites show thumbnails in the SERPS. They have recently removed these thumbnails from appearing in an organic search. More to come on this as it appears they are being filtered for in google with the duplicate content filter for some reason.
We’ve posted lots in the past about Google’s universal search initiative and the promise that it has for website video SEO. We’ve also posted in the past about the fact that although Youtube video thumbnails are dominant throughout the universal search results pages, other video sites are successfully showing thumbnails in the SERPs as well including Metacafe, Videojug, Ted.com, 5min.com, and others. We have even tested our own video thumbnails in Google previously to see that they do appear in Google’s SERP pages, but we had not seen them appear yet in the Universal one-box results.
I am pleased to tell you that it is possible, if done properly – and We did it with our little site 
Video Thumbnail Images for Bloggers a “BUG” on Google SERPS – Problem Resolved
This past week I was in Toronto for Christmas and decided to do some Google keyword searches for my site. What I found was a bit odd in that there was a new thumbnail appearing for my site’s result (see below). I thought that perhaps this was a test going on at google.ca (google canada) but then I also received an email from a reader that was concerned because she publishes a site about Rob Pattinson and there was a thumbnail of an attractive female next to her site’s search result on Google. I then found that the same thing was happening to my site in the USA.
New Google Universal Search Video Thumbnail Tests
Ever since Google launched it’s Universal Search initiative, we have seen them test various formats for the display of universal search results in the search results pages (SERPS). We have shown a you few examples in the past of some testing that Google has done with display of video results and the video thumbnail.
Video SEO Expert Mark Robertson Interview about ReelSEO
This is an interview with Me – Mark Robertson, founder of ReelSEO.com, a website focused on the online video industry, with a specific lean towards online video marketing and video search optimization, also known as Video SEO.
