Reactive Software Blog

What do you have to do to show YouTube video thumbnail in Google search results?

Just a short blog post to let everyone interested know how to show a thumbnail for your YouTube video in the Google search results (Google Universal Search).

We’ve posted our videos several months back and found them x days later in the Google search results. What seemed strange was that the same search results page had thumbnails next to YouTube entries from other authors. Our entries looked like normal webpage results. Below is a good demonstration of what we saw with our listings:

We were wondering how to get Google to show the thumbnails for our videos too.

After monitoring the listings for 5 months we can confirm that you don’t need to do anything to get Google to show thumbnails for your YouTube videos. This will happen by itself approximately 4 months later (in our case this happened exactly 4 months later).
I think it very much depends on the regular Google index update intervals. New thumbnails might appear only during the major updates to the Google index base.

As for the videos that we did our tests on, we had 5 videos participating in the tests. Each one of them had only 1 backlink from a page with Google PR of 0 (now 4).

Let me know in the comments if you have more info on the topic.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 08:08 pm and is filed under YouTube, Uncategorised. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.