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How to add a thumbnail for Google indexing in a Vimeo embedded video?

I have a website with a video from Vimeo embedded as:

<iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/496371201" frameborder="0"></iframe>

Google says that it cannot index the video because I don't provide a thumbnail. Google's documentation for video best practices states:

Provide a high-quality thumbnail

To be eligible to appear in Google video features, a video must have a valid thumbnail image. Otherwise, the page may be indexed but would only appear as a plain blue link.

You can allow Google to generate a thumbnail, or provide one in one of the supported ways:

  • If you're using the HTML tag, specify the poster attribute.
  • In a video sitemap, specify the video:thumbnail_loc tag.
  • In structured data, specify the thumbnailUrl property.
  • If you allow Google to fetch your video content files, Google can generate a thumbnail for you.

Supported thumbnail formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG.

I have the thumbnails as PNG files. What is the HTML code to include them as thumbnails near to the iframe embedded video from Vimeo so that Googlebot finds it?

Solution

  • I also have a Vimeo embed on my website.

    <iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/xxx?h=yyy" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe>

    And I also see the error "No thumbnail URL provided" in Google search console for one video page. However when I inspected the code inserted by Vimeo when the page is rendered, I see a VideoObject schema.org with a thumbnailUrl.

    <script type="application/ld+json">{"embedUrl":"https://player.vimeo.com/video/xxx?h=yyy","thumbnailUrl":"https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/aaa-bbb-d_640","name":"My cool video","description":"This video is very cool - you should watch it","duration":"PT3540S","uploadDate":"2023-07-06 02:56:51","@context":"https://schema.org/","@type":"VideoObject"}</script>

    I have quite a few Vimeo videos embedded on my website (using the same view template) and have never seen this error before, so I am assuming it's a temporary glitch with the Googlebot crawler.

    If this doesn't solve your problem, then you can add a thumbnailUrl using a schema.org VideoObject to your HTML. However, I'd do that very cautiously if you're using Vimeo because you will probably end up with duplicate schema.org which will confuse the GoogleBot more.

    See this Vimeo documentation on Video SEO https://vimeo.com/blog/post/video-seo-how-to/#include-videoobject-schema-structured-data

    Vimeo is one of the few video hosting platforms that automatically generates and inserts VideoObject Schema with its embeds. When you add Vimeo’s video embed code to a web page, the Schema is dynamically included, and Google’s crawler can read and analyze it.