Google Search Console Video indexing report gains video impressions overlay and sitemap filter

Google has upgraded the video indexing report to help your videos perform better in search.

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Google’s video indexing report within Google Search Console added some new improvements, including video impressions overlay and sitemap filter. Google announced this was done to “help you understand the performance of your videos on Google and identify possible areas of improvement.”

What is the video indexing report. The video indexing report shows how many indexed pages on your site contain one or more videos, and how many of those pages a video could be indexed. Google said the report can help you understand the performance of your videos on Google, and identify possible areas of improvement.

What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of this report for one of my sites in Google Search Console:

Video Index Report Google Search Console 800x568

Video impression overlay. The report now shows you the number of daily video impressions over time. Google said the “impressions are aggregated by page which means that if the same page appears multiple times in a single search result page (or a single Discover session), then we consider each appearance as an impression.”

Google also noted that the Search performance reports in Search Console groups video search appearances by property, not by URL. This means that if multiple pages show in a search result set Google would count only one impression. Google said, “as a result, the Search performance report can show lower impression counts than the Video page indexing report.”

Here is what it looks like:

Video Indexing Impressions

Sitemap filter. Google also added a new filter to show you which videos that Google indexed are also in your sitemap file. Google said, “to help you focus on the video pages that matter most to you, you can now filter the Video indexing report to show only video pages that are present in a selected sitemap. The filter applies to all the report features: the chart, chart totals, issue list, and exports.”

Here is that filter:

Video Indexing Sitemap Filter

Why we care. Additional reporting, debugging and analytics can help you perform better in Google Search with your videos. If you host videos on your site or embed videos on your site, you will want to check out this report to see if there are ways to improve those videos or help other videos to show up in Google Search. Videos are an important aspect of search traffic and visibility in Google Search.

There are a lot more details on this new report in this Google help document.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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