Hey everyone! With my most recent website project, I’ve put considerable effort into making my site as SEO optimized as possible. I’ve generated a sitemap and sent it to the Google Search Console, and I’ve since received an email notifying me of a ‘video indexing issue’ on a couple of my pages.
According to the search console, the pages in question are my photos page and my FAQ page. The strange thing, however, is that neither of those pages contains a video element on them, yet google is telling me the page is ‘containing a video where the page could be indexed, but no video could be indexed’. The large error text states, “No thumbnail URL provided”.
Does anyone know what might be going on? I’m pretty new to these SEO integrations so want to make sure everything is set up properly! Thanks you everyone!
Thankful for anyone who can provide any insight to this ongoing issue. I don’t know a ton about the Google Search Console, but I have a feeling that a failed validation might negatively impact my SEO rankings.
Thank you Jeff, but it seems Google’s solution to not having a video thumbnail url is as follows:
“No thumbnail image was specified for this video, and Google was unable to generate one for you. Provide a link to a thumbnail for your video using structured data, a sitemap, or an mRSS file.”
Is there a way to do this within Webflow? Can we provide a link to a thumbnail in any of the three ways they request us to do so?
@jholla12 - You can use custom code for video and meet their requirements. The built in video element might not accommodate that new feature yet. Embed.ly might (used in rich text fields).
Separate but related, I arrived at this thread when researching about the video/thumb warning.
I was getting this because of background videos. I don’t believe there’s a thumbnail option within Webflow. I checked the “Exclude background video from site indexing” under settings.
Edit: After implementing “Exclude background video from site indexing”, I still receive the error in GSC.
Surely if a fix is to use custom code to deliver the video and thumbnail this would make the video element redundant?
Seems to be something that Webflow needs to address. Webflow, can you please look into this as the video element, as it currently is, is not really of any use if Google Search Console is going to rank it negatively.
Inspect your pages’ source code: Make sure there are no video-related tags, like
Check your sitemap: Webflow automatically generates a sitemap for your site. Visit yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml (replace “yourwebsite.com” with your actual domain) to view your sitemap. Ensure that your sitemap doesn’t list any video content for those pages. If it does, you can manually exclude pages from the sitemap in Webflow by following these steps:
In your Webflow Dashboard, go to your project’s settings.
Click on the SEO tab.
Scroll down to the “Sitemap” section and click on “Edit sitemap settings.”
Exclude the pages with the video indexing issue and click “Save.”
Schema.org markup: If you’re using Schema.org markup, double-check that you don’t have any video-related schema (e.g., VideoObject) on those pages in the Webflow Designer. Remove or modify any incorrect schema to prevent false identification of video content.
Custom code, widgets, or integrations: Check any custom code, widgets, or third-party integrations you’ve added to your Webflow project that might be adding
Inspect your pages’ source code: Make sure there are no video-related tags, like
Check your sitemap: Webflow automatically generates a sitemap for your site. Visit yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml (replace “yourwebsite.com” with your actual domain) to view your sitemap. Ensure that your sitemap doesn’t list any video content for those pages. If it does, you can manually exclude pages from the sitemap in Webflow by following these steps:
In your Webflow Dashboard, go to your project’s settings.
Click on the SEO tab.
Scroll down to the “Sitemap” section and click on “Edit sitemap settings.”
Exclude the pages with the video indexing issue and click “Save.”
Schema.org markup: If you’re using Schema.org markup, double-check that you don’t have any video-related schema (e.g., VideoObject) on those pages in the Webflow Designer. Remove or modify any incorrect schema to prevent false identification of video content.
Custom code, widgets, or integrations: Check any custom code, widgets, or third-party integrations you’ve added to your Webflow project that might be adding
Setting the video to “Exclude background video from site indexing” worked. I no longer have any errors. Just took a while for search console to recognize my edits.
To all of those who are experiencing this problem, there is a wishlist post that can be voted for in the hope that Webflow might consider it and do something about it. Vote away. https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-5750
