New reason preventing your videos from being indexed: Video outside of viewport

[wikibum]

I am getting these GSC errors every day now and after doing some research, I think it's normal to get this sort of error for videos that are showing in the middle to lower part of a page. Found that answer here: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/143438/video-outside-the-viewport-but-not-really. However, I am not 100% sure that is correct.

The videos are not even mine so I don't care if they get indexed (and most are on YouTube lol, so they are def indexed) but just wondering if there is a simple solution to just remove this error from my GSC or should it just be ignored?

 

[bernard]

I think the issue is about not getting a post indexed as a video-post, not getting the video indexed in general.

 

[Ryuzaki]

There's been a couple pages of discussion on this issue and related topics: Pages literally dissapearing after google core update. The context here is it's causing the pages that the videos are on to drop out of the index and not be served at all.

The quick summary is that it's definitely a widespread bug and when you remove the videos the pages pop right back into the index.

 

[bernard]

There's been a couple pages of discussion on this issue and related topics: Pages literally dissapearing after google core update. The context here is it's causing the pages that the videos are on to drop out of the index and not be served at all.

The quick summary is that it's definitely a widespread bug and when you remove the videos the pages pop right back into the index.

It doesn't seem to only be videos though.

 

[wikibum]

The context here is it's causing the pages that the videos are on to drop out of the index and not be served at all.

The quick summary is that it's definitely a widespread bug and when you remove the videos the pages pop right back into the index.

Damn. Seriously? The videos are not even mine and are there to help the user make better decisions. For example, if we review a product - we add a video review of the product (from a 3rd party, if we don't have one of our own)

So you saying I should just delete all the videos on those pages?

Just to confirm. I have 16 pages showing that error. I checked all their keyword to see where they are ranking. Only 3/16 are in the top 100 and those 3 are less than position 40 (basically no traffic)

Just to be clear. All the pages ARE INDEXED (when I type in site:..) but 13 out of 16 are not showing up for their keywords and the other 3 are not ranking high at all.

So I guess the solution is to delete all the videos from those pages and wait for the bug to be fixed?!

 

[Darth]

I think the issue is about not getting a post indexed as a video-post, not getting the video indexed in general.

This is correct and IMO there is no indexing bug related to it. Whatever the indexing issues are, it's some other problem, like site quality.

 

[Politico]

I've been dealing with a lot of this error too.

From what I gather the video indexing issues are strictly speaking about indexing VIDEO POSTS in Google's video results - not about indexing your blog post that embeds the video, and not about the video itself being listed on YouTube.

It's meant for original videos, meaning videos your site/brand created and embedded on a post as the PRIMARY content. If you are using another persons video to supplement your content you wouldn't want that indexed as a video-post on your site anyways - it probably does nothing for you.

Video Outside Viewport means that your video is somewhere below the fold, as an "addon" to the other content on the page. It's considered SUPPLEMENTARY content and wouldn't be indexed as a video-post anyways, since "video posts" are where the video itself IS the primary content on the page.

To remove that error, the video has to be the first piece of content on the page (primary content, not supplementary) and must fit fully within the mobile viewport - i.e. "above the fold" on smartphones.

In your case, I think it's safe to ignore the error. If it's not causing you any indexing issues like discussed in that thread Ryu mentioned, you don't have to remove the video from your page either.

 

[bernard]

This is correct and IMO there is no indexing bug related to it. Whatever the indexing issues are, it's some other problem, like site quality.

If it is about the pages and not a bug, then it has to do with the individual page I think, not the site as such.

The strange thing is I see these pages bounce back stronger or same as before, so it's either a rogue algo or it's a bug.

 

[PickleRick]

@bernard @Darth

Specific pages falling out of the index is rarely a 'site quality issue' and almost always a page-specific issue. There can be many situation-specific reasons a page falls out, for example: toxic links, content theft, overlinking, bad traffic services, overoptimization etc. Some of these things might not be an issue until an update hits.

Some sort of bug with certain pages dropping out that have YouTube embeds is pretty much confirmed by many at this point. As mentioned above that error simply means your video is low on the page so your page won't be considered as a 'video page', so in theory, that should not be an issue.

However, in my case, a site of 400 pages. 20 pages with YouTube embed. 8 of those dropped out on exactly the same date as the error showed up in GSC. We are talking from top 5 positions to nowhere. Reindexing them brought them right back.

I have two theories at this point:

• Simply a bug in relation to that error in certain cases (not the actual error itself)
• According to SiteBulb all of my pages with a video contain 'possible soft 404 phrases'. They are not on my page or server. So must be coming from inside the iframe. This thread seems to also lean toward that theory. Google might be messing up here in some cases.

Also, only 1 other page dropped out for me that didn't have a video. Turned out a bunch of those spam/cloak domains (de, fr, ua, etc.) ripped the intro of my page causing mine to drop out during one of the updates. Rewriting the intro fixed that.

 

[wikibum]

@Politico I agree with that a well. My posts are not video posts, they are also indexed already. The videos in the post are not mine either. Some of the pages rank and others are not, but that is completely unrelated to the videos.

The videos are actually helpful to the user as well, so I opted on not removing them and will just wait and see what happens. I am trying to figure out how to tell Google they are not video posts, but not too worried about it!

Thank you ALL for your help and input!

 

[bernard]

Also, only 1 other page dropped out for me that didn't have a video. Turned out a bunch of those spam/cloak domains (de, fr, ua, etc.) ripped the intro of my page causing mine to drop out during one of the updates. Rewriting the intro fixed that.

Interesting, will have to look into that.

Did you add it back through GSC?

Because I've done that with some pages and for some it bounces right back or better. I really think this is a bug, but it might be helped by changing things up to get a fresh evaluation.

@PickleRick How did you figure out that your pages had been scraped?

I think there might be some to this. I can't reveal exactly but there are some issues with those pages that could be seen as something like you mentioned.

 

[PickleRick]

Interesting, will have to look into that.

Did you add it back through GSC?

Because I've done that with some pages and for some it bounces right back or better. I really think this is a bug, but it might be helped by changing things up to get a fresh evaluation.

@PickleRick How did you figure out that your pages had been scraped?

I think there might be some to this. I can't reveal exactly but there are some issues with those pages that could be seen as something like you mentioned.

Before I found the issue I just tried changing the title tag and request indexing, but no result. Couple of weeks went by.

Then just took a part of my page and searched for them in Google like: "couple sentences of your page". Then you will see if there are exact matches, sites ripping your content that is.

In my case, there were 5 spam domains using my exact introduction (~50 words). These spam domains are very prevalent atm. ccTLDs, cloaked and only visible to Googlebot IP's it seems. You'll know when you see them.

On another note, regarding the videos.

It's straightforward really, check all your pages with a YouTube embed. Filter the ones that dropped to near 0 impressions. Only for these ones (not the pages with videos that are ranking fine) try to:

1) Just request indexing
IF no result
2) Remove video and request indexing again

I went straight to removing the videos, and these pages all jumped back to where they were before within 1-2 days.

Yes, videos are helpful, yes it makes no sense etc etc.. But I rather have my traffic lol. If that simply means removing a couple of videos because of Google being weird, then so be it. Perhaps try to add them in again after the page is ranking again. I haven't tested that yet.

 

[bernard]

The video bug is definitely real, but I don't think its the main bug. It's triggering the bug, which is the same bug that is responsible for these other pages being out.

It's some kind of thin-content indexing bug is my guess.

 

[Smith]

Thought this might be relevant for everyone still facing indexing issues with video pages. It sounds like the video needs to be THE content on a page to get served up in the video search results.

I know this is different than whether a page is indexed generally, but thought it could be a contributing factor or at least explain some of the recent changes/bugs hitting pages with embedded video content.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google...1tsRpT1zefXC2MxnDYH5tCAME9sc4jgto2wK2IJfP-ouY

 

[Biggy]

Before I found the issue I just tried changing the title tag and request indexing, but no result. Couple of weeks went by.

Then just took a part of my page and searched for them in Google like: "couple sentences of your page". Then you will see if there are exact matches, sites ripping your content that is.

In my case, there were 5 spam domains using my exact introduction (~50 words). These spam domains are very prevalent atm. ccTLDs, cloaked and only visible to Googlebot IP's it seems. You'll know when you see them.

On another note, regarding the videos.

It's straightforward really, check all your pages with a YouTube embed. Filter the ones that dropped to near 0 impressions. Only for these ones (not the pages with videos that are ranking fine) try to:

1) Just request indexing
IF no result
2) Remove video and request indexing again

I went straight to removing the videos, and these pages all jumped back to where they were before within 1-2 days.

Yes, videos are helpful, yes it makes no sense etc etc.. But I rather have my traffic lol. If that simply means removing a couple of videos because of Google being weird, then so be it. Perhaps try to add them in again after the page is ranking again. I haven't tested that yet.

Same is happening with my site. Not exact same intros but they are stolen from my site whole articles spinned.

Google is slowly dying.

 

[wikibum]

I appreciate everyone's input here so I thought I would follow up with an update.

I didn't delete the videos and I didn't do anything on the pages themselves. So no changes since I posted.

I checked the rankings for the pages with warnings and they are now climbing back up with a few on page #2 + climbing. They were always indexed but not in the primary index. Now the keywords are back and climbing. The others that are not ranking have less work done on them, in terms of link building.