This is a strange one. A few people have spotted video thumbnails appearing in the search results when the page doesn’t include a video but until now nobody knew what was going on until today.
You can see an example of the rogue thumbnail below, it’s normally only shown for YouTube and other well known video sites but in this case it’s showing up for Guide To Poker.com despite the fact they don’t host any videos.
Jason from GuideToPoker.com emailed me yesterday to ask about the issue and then this afternoon after watching some of the “videos” he traced it back to a peel away ad showing in the top right hand corner of their blog – Google saw the Flash file and assumed it must be a video and indexed it.
Hover over the video in the Google Video results and you can see the peel away ad just the same as it shows on the blog.
This is a big loophole because trusted sites wanting to increase click through rates could just add Flash files to each page and get thumbnails next to all their search results.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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Very interesting – Have you seen any other examples of this?
I ran a test on a flash-game-site I run and was able to get flashgames show up in the serps with a video thumbnail, just by submitting a video-xml sitemap.
google is slipping on this
Good find. I noticed the same thing happening on John Chow’s blog and he has the Peel Away Ads installed. http://www.google.com/search?&q=site:johnchow.com
Wow….quite a good catch! Wonder when Google will, ahem, notice this?
Wow, what do you know. That’s an interesting way to get noticed online – the name of the game.
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Thanks for the useful information on Google showing the video ads.
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I don’t think this is happening to all sites though – lots of sites incorporate flash files and yet Google hasn’t put thumbnails up for those? Maybe it’s only high rated & trusted sites that benefit from this?
More comments from LuciI am seeing results like this from Widgetbox in the US Serps. Taking the info from this post, they have a Flash widget that is most likely creating this thumbnail image.
Thanks for the useful information on Google showing the video ads.
I am seeing results like this from Widgetbox in the US Serps. Taking the info from this post, they have a Flash widget that is most likely creating this thumbnail image.
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