Google Search Console Video markup issues: Missing field “thumbnailUrl”

  • Resolved lechon

    (@lechon)


    5 years, 5 months ago

    Hi,

    First of all thanks for this great plugin you have made, I have been using it for a while and it’s my go to plugin for self serving videos for my site.

    For some reason today I received a notification from Google Search Console about not indexing any of the videos embedded with this plugin because of Video markup issues.

    I have a combination of Youtube and self served videos on the site. The only videos that got flagged by Google are the videos embedded with this plugin.

    Google says that there is one item that is causing the videos not to be indexed. Invalid items are not eligible for Google Search’s rich results. That item is listed below:

    Missing field: “thumbnailUrl”

    Here is a screen shot from the URL inspection on Search console (sample version):

    View post on imgur.com

    I was able to confirm this as well using Google Rich results testing tool:

    https://search.google.com/test/rich-results

    I have 430 videos embedded with this plugin and I was hoping you could help me resolve this issue of how to have that Missing field: “thumbnailUrl” implemented. The videos are part of posts, and they all have related images to the post, but somehow the video itself does not have its own thumbnail for Google to index and show as video rich results.

    Best regards,

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Plugin Author Kyle Gilman

    (@kylegilman)

    Do your videos have thumbnails? If they don’t have thumbnails, that’s the #1 reason why they would not have the thumbnailUrl metadata but it’s hard to guess. Can you post a link to a page that has this problem?

    I have the same problem. Are we talking about potentially missing thumbnails on YouTube or in WordPress here?

    Thread Starter lechon

    (@lechon)

    Hi Kyle,

    I found the issue and a fix.

    Yes the videos all had thumbnails.

    If you are using a plugin like “All in One SEO” or “Yoast SEO”, the Video Embed & Thumbnail Generator will have a conflict with them if you have enabled on Video Embed & Thumbnail Generator settings: “Enable Schema.org structured data markup for search engines” under the section “Video sharing”. Turning this feature off will resolve the conflict with the SEO plugins, as these plugins generate their own version of Schema.org structured data markup. Make sure you clear all caches after settings.

    Again thanks for keeping this wonderful plugin alive and well.

    Cheers!

    Hello there,

    Just wanted to share my experience with video description, name and upload date missing error. I have around 90 posts and 10 pages, most of my posts have embedded videos. But only four of them showed up on the console.

    So I went through each post, deleted the Youtube video, opened the video on actual Youtube and clicked Share then embed. There I would copy the URL with “https://www.youtube.com/embed/XXXXXXX” format and paste into my post. Finally saved the post and cleared cache.

    I tested a faulty page here on Google’s structured data test tool and there were 3 errors exactly as I saw on the search console. After I followed the steps above and retest the data, there were no errors showed up anymore.

    https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool

    That’s why I believe this fix will be validated. However, if I had 100 posts with 2 embedded videos each, it would take ages to finish all the manual update.

    Hope that helps,

    Osman

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 5 months ago by cigiloviccom.
    Thread Starter lechon

    (@lechon)

    Hi @cigiloviccom
    I know exactly what you mean.

    In my case I use the testing tool and then then I have to run a test on Search Console so Google can index the page. It does take a long time.

    I just cleared my top 10 videos for now.

    The issue here is that Google has a very aggressive cache and it’s going to take a while to re crawl your site again.

    Hello there,

    Just wanted to update the current status in case someone needs to know…

    As I mentioned above, the method I used worked like a charm. All the problematic pages with videos have been validated by Google and no issues left.

    Thank you

    @cigiloviccom: Can you share a URL where you’ve implemented this solution? Our client, like many sites, use embedded YouTube videos, but I’m unclear where we add the ‘thumbnailUrl’ and other parameters. Is it within the <embed> code they grabbed from YouTube, or in a new snippet of JavaScript placed in the <head> tag?

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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