There has been a surge in complaints from site owners and publishers who are seeing the "Video is not the main content of the page" error in the video indexing section of Google Search Console. This should come as no surprise to many of you who read here, as Google told us this may occur with the new expanded video guidelines that launched last week.
But the Google forums are littered with complaints around this Video is not the main content of the page error.
Here is what the error looks like for many, including this site:
As a reminder, Google requires that the video be the main or primary content on the page for it to show your video in video mode, not just as video thumbnails in the search results as it did back in April.
Google wrote, "The video is not the main content or primary focus for this page; only videos that are the main content of the page are eligible for indexing. Here are some examples of page types where the video is supplementary to the textual content, and not the primary focus of the page:"
- A blog post where the video is complementary to the text rather than the primary content of the page
- A product details page with a complementary video
- A video category page that lists multiple videos of equal prominence
Google also added this note to the data anomalies page, saying, "November 30: Google Search is now only showing pages in Video mode where the video is the main content of the page. You can expect to see a decrease in the number of pages with indexed videos. This decrease will appear in the number of video impressions in the performance report, video indexing report, and the video rich results report in Search Console. Read more in our blog post."
If you browse the Google Webmaster Help Forums you will see countless complaints and threads about this error.
I got them too because the vidoes here, even though I moved them up the page to the first part of the video landing page, they are still not considered part of the main content. It is fine, I also host them on YouTube, so I don't really care but it is an issue for many publishers.
In fact, this is the performance report for this site filtered by video - look at how much of an impact it had on this site:
Here are more charts showing even larger drop-offs after this change, some are pretty scary to look at:
Here are four different sites where clicks dropped off a cliff for video search (or what Google is now calling "video mode"). This is a big difference from just removing video thumbnails. It's a ranking change, so those are lost clicks for the site. Now, you could always create… pic.twitter.com/iMqtaJzI8c
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) December 12, 2023
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help Forums.
Update on January 17, 2024, it is not getting any better:
Google hates my videos - oh, not just mine, here is why (older story) https://t.co/Fw7fZYVypZ pic.twitter.com/lY1ySpjP5y
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) January 17, 2024
