• by Laurie Sullivan , June 19, 2018

A video carousel, mainly intended for mobile, has been serving up in Google desktop search results, replacing video thumbnails.

RankRanger Content Manager Mordy Oberstein began seeing the change in early June, but noticed a sharp decline around June 14. By June 18, 2018, the video thumbnails were all but gone.

“The data here is a bit deceiving, as it would appear that Google, when it does still show the Video Thumbnail, is purposefully showing more of them on the page,” Oberstein wrote in a post. “I pulled 450 keywords at random from our 500K SERP feature keyword dataset and found that this is most likely not the case at all.”

Instead, he wrote, it appears many of the keywords tend to be those that contain a large number of Video Thumbnails, which means that the average has increased not because Google is adding more thumbnails to scoring pages, but because lower-volume hits have been removed from the data pool. 

Google has not removed each instance of keywords that product video thumbnails, Oberstein wrote. Searchers can still type in keyword phrases like “remix songs,” “money song,” and Music for concentration and focus” to find thumbnails.  

Oberstein believes the video carousel produces more opportunities for content creators and viewers on platforms other than YouTube because it pulls in videos from many more different types of sites.

“The biggest losers are those YouTube channels/creators who previously ranked on page one, most likely with a Video Thumbnail, but now do not appear within the first three cards of the new video carousel, he wrote. 

Previously, the first page of search rankings were pretty much filled with YouTube URLs, he wrote. With the new carousel Google has more space to fill in the results page, which presents a new opportunity for sites that were precluded from the top organic results as a result of YouTube URLs, he wrote.