Google significantly revamped its documentation about ranking pages that contain video content. While the changelog lists three areas that changed, a review of the content provides a case study of four considerations for digital marketers and publishers when refreshing content to improve relevance for site visitors—and Google.
What Changed
The documentation that was updated relates to ranking web pages that contain videos. The purpose of the documentation is to communicate best practices for optimizing videos for higher visibility in Google’s search results.
Google’s changelog indicated that there were three major changes to the Video SEO best practices page.
- Clarified video indexing criteria
- Updated technical requirements
- Added a new section about dedicated watch pages for each video
This is what the changelog shows what was changed:
“Improving the Video SEO documentation
What: Overhauled the video SEO best practices. Notably, we clarified the video indexing criteria and technical requirements, added a new watch page section, and expanded our examples.
Why: Based on feedback submissions, we revisited our video SEO guidance to clarify what’s eligible for a video result and how site owners can make it easier for Google to find their videos.”
Four Reasons To Refresh Content
There’s a common misinterpretation that encourages changing content annually because “Google loves fresh content,” which is a gross misunderstanding of the Freshness Algorithm. Content shouldn’t be changed without purpose—otherwise, it’s just “rearranging the furniture” instead of truly “redesigning the space.”
Google’s reasons for updating the content offer a mini case study of three things publishers and businesses should consider when freshening up their content.
These are the three reasons for changing the Video SEO content:
- Remove Outdated Content
- Improved Information Density
- Add Fresh Information
- Update For Brevity And Clarity
1. Remove Outdated Content
The old version of the documentation was written when video as web content was a “growing format” and the changes reflect that the times have changed, rendering the old content out of date.
“Video is a growing format for content creation and consumption on the web, and Google indexes videos from millions of different sites to serve to users. “
Videos in content are not a growing format. The editors of the web page were right to remove that passage because it no longer made any sense.
Takeaway: Always keep up to date with how your readers perceive the topic. Failure to do this will make the content look less authoritative and trustworthy.
2. Improved Information Density
Information density in this context describes the ability of content to communicate ideas and topics with the least amount of words and with the highest amount of clarity.
An opening sentence should reflect what the entire topic of the web page is about but the original opening sentence did a poor job of communicating that. It referenced that “Video is a growing format” which is a statement that absolutely did not reflect the web page topic.
This is the new opening sentence:
“If you have videos on your site, following these video SEO best practices can help more people find your site through video results on Google.”
The new sentence accurately describes the topic of the entire web page is about in only 23 words. Here’s something really cool: The second sentence remains exactly the same between the old and revised versions.
Takeaway: The lesson here is to revise what needs to be revised and don’t make changes when the original works just fine.
3. Add Fresh Information
An important change that all publishers should consider is to update content with fresh content that reflects how topics evolve over time. Products, laws, how consumers use services and products, everything undergoes some kind of change over time.
Google added content about tools available in Google Search Console that enable publishers to monitor the performance of their video content pages.
4. Update For Brevity And Clarity
The third reason for changing some of the content was to make it more concise, easier to read with simplified language. One of the subtle changes they made was change the phrase “landing page” to “watch page.” This seemingly small change clarifies the meaning of the sentence by making it super clear that they are referring to a page where videos are watched. Previously the documentation made zero references to watch page and now it makes 21 references to that phrase, introducing consistency in the message of the web page.
Many Reasons To Update Content
Every publisher should consider reviewing their content on a daily basis, whether that’s once a year for a smaller site, or chunking it up and tackling different sections on a monthly basis, a content review is a great way to keep content relevant to users and to discover new topics for content. Sometimes it’s better to break out a topic from a web page and create a dedicated page for it.
Read the updated documentation:
Video SEO best practices
Compare it to the old documentation at Archive.org:
Video SEO best practices
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