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A bunch of changes were rolled out by Google changes in the way they treat rich snippets in the search results. Of these shifts, was the one to dramatically trim down the frequency of video snippets in universal search results, confining them exclusively to domains where video is the core offering of the site.
A list of domains receiving rich snippets as of August 2014
Why did Google do this?
• If YouTube will become the source of the overwhelming majority of video results in Google search, traffic coming to the YouTube will certainly increase resulting into more companies to put all their videos on YouTube and thus selling more and more ads.
• Spamming can be very easy when it comes to Video snippets and getting video results for almost any page just by implementing the correct mark-up can also be very easy. This fact was kind of spoiling the user experience and therefore there was a need to strip the videos back to just pages and domains where video was clearly the core offering. It even shown those video snippets in results that even didn’t have video on the page.
• Again with mobile search becoming more and more important there was a need to strip the videos back to just pages and domains where video was clearly the core offering as even in case of mobile devices, video results were rendering clumsily.
• Google wants people to use the tabbed search features more and that if a lot of videos from universal search are removed it will make users to be more explicit when they want a video.
Does this affect your video marketing strategy?
Certainly yes!
Rich snippets actually matters a lot when it comes to video SEO and so if Google has listed all YouTube videos while removing snippets from most other sites it will certainly have a profound impact on your video marketing strategy. In fact the bottom-line is hosting through YouTube is now the only way most of you can get a video snippet ranking in universal search, even though always pointing to the youtube.com instance of a video, rather than your own site.
Now, YouTube has become more valuable and important as a marketing channel especially when it comes to SEO. So, now if you want to get your content ranking for some competitive terms securing an eye-catching snippet in the process, you can do it easily through YouTube. This has made YouTube to become one of the most powerful tools in any SEOs arsenal, when it comes to owning Google SERP real estate.
So, using YouTube as part of your marketing mix if you want to fortify your brand as a key player for any popular search topic is a good idea. Moreover, you can consider YouTube as a way to optimize secondary pages for competitive queries. This can occupy extra spots alongside pages from your own website, thus expanding your own presence in the search results and shrinking the exposure your competitors get.
Still!
The tactic should be meticulously tested for every individual site before rolling out at scale as it amplifies chances of your organic traffic getting cannibalized if you have both- a YouTube video ranking and a page on your own site as well.
The Bottom-Line However
“If you have an SEO strategy that doesn’t include YouTube, you’re doing it wrong!”
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