Video is not the main content of the page (SEO)

[ahmed salama]

He faced the same problem to a large extent. I hope we find a solution to it as soon as possible. I will try the first and second steps

[naughtyking]

its work for me now after i did this two steps ( step 3 is unnecessary) : 
i lost the last month 10k videos page and just before two days i did the two steps and today i see that i have get back my 10k videos indexed :) 🔥

 

1) In ./htaccess file in your www root directory (can be edited via FTP or server File Manager) locate these 2 lines going together:

RewriteRule ^videos/([0-9]+)/([^/]+)/$      view_video.php?id=$1&dir=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^videos/([^/]+)/$               view_video.php?dir=$1 [L,QSA]

and change ^videos/ to ^video/ in URL pattern (beginning of the line):

RewriteRule ^video/([0-9]+)/([^/]+)/$      view_video.php?id=$1&dir=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^video/([^/]+)/$               view_video.php?dir=$1 [L,QSA]

If you don't have these lines, likely your theme is customized to use some other video page URLs, this guide provides only information about default KVS theme URL pattern.

Also in the upper section of this same file named "# seo redirect rules" add these lines to redirect old video URLs to new:

RewriteRule ^videos/([0-9]+)/([^/]+)/$  /video/$1/$2/ [R=301,L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^videos/([^/]+)/$  /video/$1/ [R=301,L,QSA]

 

2) In KVS admin panel go to Settings -> Website settings and modify Video page URL pattern to "video" instead of "videos". Now all your video pages should be using the new URL pattern.

[karasukvs]

On 1/26/2024 at 6:15 PM, naughtyking said:

its work for me now after i did this two steps ( step 3 is unnecessary) : 
i lost the last month 10k videos page and just before two days i did the two steps and today i see that i have get back my 10k videos indexed :) 🔥

 

1) In ./htaccess file in your www root directory (can be edited via FTP or server File Manager) locate these 2 lines going together:

RewriteRule ^videos/([0-9]+)/([^/]+)/$      view_video.php?id=$1&dir=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^videos/([^/]+)/$               view_video.php?dir=$1 [L,QSA]

and change ^videos/ to ^video/ in URL pattern (beginning of the line):

RewriteRule ^video/([0-9]+)/([^/]+)/$      view_video.php?id=$1&dir=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^video/([^/]+)/$               view_video.php?dir=$1 [L,QSA]

If you don't have these lines, likely your theme is customized to use some other video page URLs, this guide provides only information about default KVS theme URL pattern.

Also in the upper section of this same file named "# seo redirect rules" add these lines to redirect old video URLs to new:

RewriteRule ^videos/([0-9]+)/([^/]+)/$  /video/$1/$2/ [R=301,L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^videos/([^/]+)/$  /video/$1/ [R=301,L,QSA]

 

2) In KVS admin panel go to Settings -> Website settings and modify Video page URL pattern to "video" instead of "videos". Now all your video pages should be using the new URL pattern.

I agree it works, but I started losing traffic of about 30k in 4 days

[Focus]

It works, but now you have to wait for all the videos to get the proper URL from *videos to video* and then everything should get back to normal. Thanks for the help, everyone.

[nighking]

i want ask guys when i did the same steps need to resubmit the sitemap or will fixed bcz my sitemap is everytime not updated automatique this is screen

[naughtyking]

On 1/28/2024 at 9:13 AM, karasukvs said:

I agree it works, but I started losing traffic of about 30k in 4 days

i didn't lose any traffic.

[naughtyking]

On 1/28/2024 at 7:27 PM, Focus said:

It works, but now you have to wait for all the videos to get the proper URL from *videos to video* and then everything should get back to normal. Thanks for the help, everyone.

ok but its not affect my traffic. you should do last part in step one 
 

RewriteRule ^videos/([0-9]+)/([^/]+)/$  /video/$1/$2/ [R=301,L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^videos/([^/]+)/$  /video/$1/ [R=301,L,QSA]

to redirect visitor to new url i think

[karasukvs]

On 1/30/2024 at 1:05 AM, naughtyking said:

ok but its not affect my traffic. you should do last part in step one 
 

RewriteRule ^videos/([0-9]+)/([^/]+)/$  /video/$1/$2/ [R=301,L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^videos/([^/]+)/$  /video/$1/ [R=301,L,QSA]

to redirect visitor to new url i think

Everything was done according to instructions

[user1]

We're running nginx, we've followed all the steps and we're still not getting google to bring back all the pages, we have lost a LOT of traffic due to this. Here are our nginx rules. We have over 40 sites with quite a lot of sites having lost 100k videos on them... We REALLY need to figure out what is going on.

 

rewrite ^/videos/([0-9]+)/([^/]+)/$     /video/$1/$2/ permanent;
rewrite ^/videos/([^/]+)/$              /video/$1/ permanent;

rewrite ^/video/([0-9]+)/([^/]+)/$      /view_video.php?id=$1&dir=$2 last;
rewrite ^/video/([^/]+)/$               /view_video.php?dir=$1 last;

 

 

[Tech Support]

You need to check if the redirect is actually working or not.

For example on our demo site you can try old URL (which contains /videos):

https://www.kvs-demo.com/videos/173/beyonc-suga-mama/

and then it should open the one with /video/ instead in your browser address line:

https://www.kvs-demo.com/video/173/beyonc-suga-mama/

If this is working for your site, then your redirect is working and your rewrite URLs are correct.

If redirect rules are not correct, you will see that URL with /videos/ is still opening in your browser without any redirect.

[user1]

Understood, just trying to find a reason as to why everyone else seems to be getting videos back and we're not seeing the same :/

 

not sure what to do to get things back to normal...

[Tech Support]

6 hours ago, user1 said:

why everyone else seems to be getting videos back and we're not seeing the same

What do you mean by this?

[mongoose657]

8 hours ago, user1 said:

Understood, just trying to find a reason as to why everyone else seems to be getting videos back and we're not seeing the same :/

 

not sure what to do to get things back to normal...

You are not alone. My urls were already /video to begin with and I have over 100k deindexed still

[user1]

Could you remove our. domain from the posts.

What I mean is that everyone else seems to be getting this working and this doesn't seem to be working for us. Not sure what the difference is.

[Tech Support]

7 hours ago, user1 said:

Could you remove our. domain from the posts.

We have removed the posts.

7 hours ago, user1 said:

What I mean is that everyone else seems to be getting this working and this doesn't seem to be working for us. Not sure what the difference is.

Do you mean you don't see redirect when you try to open your old URL style as /videos/....? This is not normal if true.

9 hours ago, mongoose657 said:

You are not alone. My urls were already /video to begin with and I have over 100k deindexed still

It might be many factors that influence this. I'm 100% confident this is done by AI, and nobody in Google understands how it decides which page is main video content, and which is not. They have fed it with millions of video pages and told this is main video content. And then again millions of other pages and told this is not main video content. Then AI analyzed everything possible and decided that main video content should be likely located on the URL that contains /video/ in it. Then it is more likely main video content if its H1 tag contains "Video" word. Then it may be even more likely if a <title> tag contains "Video" word. There should be other dozen of factors, like video player position relative to overall page, the amount of other content on the page and some more, could be even colors used in design.

Now you should prove to Google AI that your pages are likely main video pages, so you should try adding more similarities with other video pages. But nobody knows which ones. For KVS default theme we found that it is only required to rename /videos/ to /video/. But we still have like 1300 pages for kvs-demo.com that are still not re-indexed after the change, and they are still marked as the issue.

[Jim]

I noticed video pages being indexed now which is positive. However the overall number of pages indexed has fallen slightly, it seems to be pages with the "videos" in the url and the reason given "page with redirect". With the site urls now being "video" none of the "videos" pages should now be visible to the crawler - is that correct?

[Egg]

Indexed videos seem to be fine now, but the change from /videos/ to /video/ might have caused an issue with the sitemap. Might sitemap perhaps need an update?

[Tech Support]

2 hours ago, Egg said:

Indexed videos seem to be fine now, but the change from /videos/ to /video/ might have caused an issue with the sitemap.

Which issue with sitemap did it cause?

[Egg]

The sitemap doesn't locate the re-indexed videos, but rather lists the old /videos/ links which are no longer crawled, thus the result is 0 indexed videos according to the sitemap.

[Keb]

Hey - Just reading all this, I'm a bit confused why changing from /videos/  to /video/ 

If you go to some of the biggest sites [ examples -  xhamster & faphouse and even Reddit all use /videos/ ] -  And have actually gained traffic per SemRush.
So I'm not too sure that was the issue - I have also not experienced any deindexed and I use /videos/ 

I did experience some issues with 1 video site a few months back - after doing some digging around, it was advised I remove any ads at the top of my page and allow the video player to fully load before the fold of the site. So I did - I had 1 ad at the top that would appear before the video player and removed it -  I also moved the title, date, user to below the video as well -  I saw improvements within a few weeks.

If you go over to Twitter and search "google deindexed videos"  You will see 100s of people who have experienced their videos getting deindex from all sorts of niches, sports, entertainment, podcasts - starting in October 2023 - each person has a "different" reason as to why and how they tried to fix it.

I just wanted to say this, as I don't believe the deindex issue is specific to KVS.
 

 

[Tech Support]

10 hours ago, Egg said:

The sitemap doesn't locate the re-indexed videos, but rather lists the old /videos/ links which are no longer crawled, thus the result is 0 indexed videos according to the sitemap.

Please create support ticket, this would probably mean that you have missed one of the steps.

[Tech Support]

4 hours ago, Keb said:

Hey - Just reading all this, I'm a bit confused why changing from /videos/  to /video/ 

If you go to some of the biggest sites [ examples -  xhamster & faphouse and even Reddit all use /videos/ ] -  And have actually gained traffic per SemRush.
So I'm not too sure that was the issue - I have also not experienced any deindexed and I use /videos/ 

I did experience some issues with 1 video site a few months back - after doing some digging around, it was advised I remove any ads at the top of my page and allow the video player to fully load before the fold of the site. So I did - I had 1 ad at the top that would appear before the video player and removed it -  I also moved the title, date, user to below the video as well -  I saw improvements within a few weeks.

If you go over to Twitter and search "google deindexed videos"  You will see 100s of people who have experienced their videos getting deindex from all sorts of niches, sports, entertainment, podcasts - starting in October 2023 - each person has a "different" reason as to why and how they tried to fix it.

I just wanted to say this, as I don't believe the deindex issue is specific to KVS.
 

 

Yes, you are right. Again as we noted, there should be a complex variety of different criteria. And then AI bot weights all those criteria and makes a decision with some probability. So it looks like using /video/ part in URL is one of the factors used. Probably using "Video" word in title is another factor used. It looks like there are also some design / layout factors involved. And it turned out that for KVS default theme it is enough to change to /video/ URL to have all videos being weighted as main video content. But for your site, it may be that other factors are over-weighting the URL factor, so you don't need to change this.

[user1]

We're seeing a lot of top results have this:

Page indexing

Page is not indexed: Page with redirect

 

Also on the same report from GSC:

Discovery

Sitemaps

No referring sitemaps detected

 

This is obviously due to the /videos/ to /video/ and we've done the 301. We have the sitemap in place too and that's obviously using /video/ too unless it needs refreshing to /video/ ? 

 

We've been requesting a recrawl of pages with redirects but taking forever for Google to do it properly. Any other methods to get them to follow /videos/ to /video/

 

[Focus]

How can the sitemap be fixed? It currently sends information as /videos/ but I would like to update it to /video/

Thanks

[Tech Support]

This will happen automatically after you do this:

On 1/18/2024 at 1:45 PM, Tech Support said:

2) In KVS admin panel go to Settings -> Website settings and modify Video page URL pattern to "video" instead of "videos". Now all your video pages should be using the new URL pattern.

Maybe with some delay (up to 24 hours) due to caching.