Google Can Show Video Thumbnails In Search Even Without Embedding Video On Page

Crystal Carter posted an example on Twitter of Google showing a video thumbnail for a snippet of her page but that page did not actually embed a video on the page. So if you visit the specific page, there is no video for a user to click on to play.

To be fair, there is an OG video tag with the video in the source code, but there is no visible video on the page that is rendered to a user to play.

Here is a screenshot of the snippet from yesterday:

So I guess the lesson here is that you should make sure not to include OG video tags when there is no video on the page. The lesson for Google is to make sure that a visible video renders on the page before showing a video snippet in the search results?

To be fair, this was a video specific search and Google does show landing pages that contain video elements. But yea, no – there was no video for real users to see on the page.

Crystal also did link to the YouTube video with the featured image from the video – but again, it is not playable on the page.

And the worst part, I see the “uploaded by” reference, which I hate – hate so much.

So is it the OG code or the video linked to from the page?

Yes, exactly what I was just about to tweet! I believe that’s due to the open graph tag there for video. og:video which lists the YouTube video.

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) May 18, 2022

Yeah that’s why I thought it was strange, I wasn’t trying for the video pos. I had a draft with the clip then removed it (hence the tag).

Interesting to see the impact of the og tag though!

— Crystal Carter (@CrystalontheWeb) May 18, 2022

There is a lot of fun discussion about this on the Twitter thread, so check it out there as well.

Forum discussion at Twitter.