On Thursday, Google released a big list of changes it made throughout August and September. There were sixty-five in all, and we’ve discussed a handful of subsets of them in various articles, which you can find here.
A few of the changes were related to how Google deals with video, so if video is part of your content mix, these may be worth noting.
For one, Google has made changes to the way it indexes videos, and it’s also gotten better at understanding video intent in relation to when it will show universal search results. As any video provider knows, these video universal results are a major factor of what makes video good for SEO.
Here are the changes Google announced that relate to video:
- Maru. [project “SafeSearch”] We updated SafeSearch to improve the handling of adult video content in videos mode for queries that are not looking for adult content.
- #83613. [project “Universal Search”] This change added the ability to show a more appropriately sized video thumbnail on mobile when the user clearly expresses intent for a video.
- #82546. [project “Indexing”] We made back-end improvements to video indexing to improve the efficiency of our systems.
- #83406. [project “Query Understanding”] We improved our ability to show relevant Universal Search results by better understanding when a search has strong image intent, local intent, video intent, etc.