Video Pages pages are pages where a single video is the main content of that page. This Best Practices document is intended to support technical teams, and content creation teams. Our goal is to ensure the content and structure of your Video pages are optimized to align with Google’s best practices. Use this document as a checklist during the development and revision of HTML templates for pages with Video content.
As always, if you have any follow-up questions, please contact [email protected] for guidance.
Typical Page Content
This section describes content commonly seen on this type of page. This checklist is best used during high level design & brainstorming as you design templates & decide what information you intend to display. It may also be helpful for evaluating potential CMS and video hosting solutions.
Typical Page Content | Description & Details | Typical Targeting Approach |
| Page Content | ||
| Name | Name or title of the WebPage that is the viewing page for the Video | Via Highlight |
| Author/Editor/Publisher | The author, editor, or publisher of the WebPage | Via Highlight |
| Date Published/Date Modified | The date the WebPage was published, and the date it was last modified. | Via Highlight |
| Accompanying Text | Minimal on-page text describing and contextualizing the video | Via Highlight |
| Video Player | An HTML component containing the video itself. Schema App can use information from the Video Player and hosting platform to generate Schema Markup using the platform's API. For more information review the section on Video Integrations. | Via Highlight |
| Video Metadata Content | ||
| Name | The name of the Video | Via API from CMS |
| Publisher | The publisher of the WebPage, typically pulling from the video hosting platform. This will reference the canonical URL of the Profile Page. Be sure to include this URL as a sameAs value in your Organization markup. | Via API from CMS |
| Date Published/Date Modified | The date the Video was published and/or last modified. | Via API from CMS |
| Description | The description of the Video. If this content is not populated in the hosting platform CMS, then this property will not be populated in the JSON-LD. | Via API from CMS |
| Thumbnail URL | The thumbnail preview image for the video. | Via API from CMS |
Video Integrations
oEmbed API Protocol
With the Highlighter tool, Schema App can generate VideoObject structured data using the oEmbed API protocol. A full list of providers can be found here. Notable providers include YouTube, Vimeo, and Wistia. No action is required from your Organization to provide Schema App with access as this is an open API protocol.
Note: changes to your video metadata can take up to 3 days to be reflected. This number can increase if there is significant site caching.
Auto-generated WordPress Markup
If a page is receiving auto-generated markup via the WordPress plugin, the oEmbed API protocol ought to generate VideoObject markup for any videos within the page content.
Brightcove API Protocol
If your organization hosts videos using Brightcove, we can generate VideoObject structured data from the Brightcove API. Your Organization must register an application for Schema App in order to provide us with access to your API. The instructions for registering a Brightcove application from within Schema App’s tools can be found here.
Content and Code Requirements
The following content and/or code requirements will support your Organizations's ability to target and include all the required information for Video Rich Result eligibility.
Video Content & Metadata in Your Content Management System
If there are videos in your CMS that are missing metadata that map to required Video Rich Result properties (e.g description, name) then those Video Pages will have errors and warnings in GSC and the Rich Results Test.
Content & Embed URLs
Google uses the content URL to fetch the video file and assess its audio and visual content. The URL must be stable, must be accessible via Robots.txt and have the required server capacity to be crawled.
The content and embed URLs should be accessible within the HTML document. Nested #document data is inaccessible to the Schema App Highlighter. Special attention may be required for Brightcove, and other pages where the content/embedURLs are not present in an usable format.
Author/Editor/Publisher Content
Video Pages are typically published by the Organization that is the main entity of the website that the Video Pages are part of. The Organization can be defined using the Schema App Editor. If the Video Page does not contain text, authorship may not be required.
Video Page FAQs
Why all the fuss about a Video needing to be the “main content of page”?
Since 2022 Google has made significant changes to how Videos are indexed, and displayed. From 2023, a key message from Google has been to create dedicated pages where a Video is the primary entity of a page. Videos may appear on several pages such as a dedicated Video page, and a Product page where the video content is contextualized. Google uses various signals and structured sources to understand videos and Video Pages.
What signals does Google use to understand Video Pages?
Google uses a combination of on-page data (e.g HTML, structured markup) and user-submitted data (e.g video sitemaps). Google aims to understand the content of the video using on-page text, referring links, and schema markup. If the video file is accessible (and ideally it should be!) Google can also fetch and analyze video files to analyze their audio and visual content.
What if my Video Page uses a third party embedded player?
If those Videos are embedded on your site, and the third party’s website (e.g YouTube), then Google may index that Video from both sources and both sources may show up in Google.
What happens when I have a video on several different pages?
Video Pages are critical to helping Google understand why videos may appear in different contexts. It is very normal for videos to appear in multiple places. Third party players, collection or item pages, and translated pages are all common scenarios where this might happen.
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