Think twice before integrating videos on your pages

[miozio]

We recently put a few videos on our site that play from our server. Google liked those and moved the positions a couple of spots higher but replaced the normal results with a video link.

The problem is the clicks dropped 50%. Our niche is for buying people who look for certain products but they are not interested in videos.

Google generated a really bad snapshot and now it even looks unclear what's it all about.

I was curious to see if other webmasters had the same issue and how they resolved it without deleting the video. How do I make my own snapshot visible in G results, will they update it if I integrate my own image in the flash video script?

[1one1]

You should add a video sitemap to your site, this should replace the video rankings with your site rankings.

[levo]

Same thing happened to me too. I had to move them to dedicated video pages.

Create separate pages with videos that auto-play (just like a youtube page), add video-meta-tags to those pages, and create a video-sitemaps for them.

Add links to video pages from content pages (or Google might not index them). Use javascript to invoke a lightbox to play videos within the content page.

[miozio]

Thank you for your answers, I guess both of the solutions are good and i will have to decide which one is better for this site. Levo, did you keep the video result along with the ordinary one?

[levo]

You keep your ranking for content pages, listed as a 'normal' page, and video pages get listed in video search. Video pages may also get listed along the content pages from time to time.