Google SERP shows wrong (and inappropriate) thumbnail for Facebook videos?

[infamia]

Hello

I'm running into a strange issue with at least one of my client's video. The video is posted on Facebook. When searching for the video on Google, the SERP shows a completely wrong, and inappropriate, thumbnail image. (And in one case the preview video starts playing within Google SERP.) It also seems that Google is indexing various countries' facebook page for the same video separately (it-it.facebook.com, fr-fr.facebook.com, etc). Note that only the thumbnail and preview video within Google are wrong; if you click on the link, you see the correct video and page.

I hesitate to divulge the actual client video, but there are some reports on Google's search community about the same behavior:

• Here's one that stargs back in March: https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/33760205?hl=en
• and a more recent one: https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/71452151?hl=en

It looks increasingly like a bug in some google algorithm, but nobody at google seems to acknowledge that. I've unpublished the original video from FB and submitted an 'outdated content' removal to Google, which is pending.

In the meantime, my questions for our group of experts here:

1. Has anyone else experienced this and any other suggestionso n how to fix?
2. If we assume that this is not a google bug: how could a malicious actor or black-hat SEO influence Google's algorithms to cause this?

Thanks,

mickey

[infamia]

Removing (unpublishing) content from facebook and using Gogole's removal tool works after a day or two. However, the issue returns when re-publishing and reintroduces the content .

This looks a lot like a bug in Google's algorithm. In one case, they publish the same thumbnail photo for two different videos (although the titles were related):

[infamia]

Thanks for responding, seoelevated. I'll add sepecific details on the videoObject schema further down.

I've had some success with removing these from Google SERP following these steps:

1. Un-publish the page from FB (or from wherever else, presumably)
2. Submit the URLs (copied from Google SERP) to Google's "remove out dated content"
3. Google will complain that the page is still live, but click "Yes", it has indeed been updated or removed
4. Select "the snippet and cache are outdated". (If you select " completely removed," the request will be Denied)
5. Add some word from the google SERP snippet that would not appear on the updated page.
6. repeat this process for all versions of this.

For step 6, I had submitted removal rquests for the same video on facebook.com, de-de.facebook.com, and zh-cn.facebook.com. I did not, however, submit it-it.facebok.com, and the wrong thumbnail still shows up on that page. (I just submitted that for removal as well.)

Next steps: I'll re-publish the facebook video pages and see what happens

Now, about schema: Yes I've checked the VideoObject schema. Here is an example with an unrelated video, one that also has an unrelated image but not an offensive one: https://www.facebook.com/CIPEDC/videos/10152675950170686/

When I look at the schema JSON on the page source I see a correct thumbnail: https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t15.5256-10/10963580_10152675951280686_1532157832_n.jpg?_nc_cat=103&_nc_sid=ed1892&_nc_ohc=3RP7d75npd4AX94ZsXC&_nc_ht=scontent-iad3-1.xx&oh=23f2c96e4bad740fcc2cbaf7f9b33bd0&oe=5F90B8FD :

_    "thumbnailUrl": "https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t15.5256-10/10963580_10152675951280686_1532157832_n.jpg?_nc_cat=103&_nc_sid=ed1892&_nc_ohc=3RP7d75npd4AX94ZsXC&nc_ht=scontent-iad3-1.xx&oh=23f2c96e4bad740fcc2cbaf7f9b33bd0&oe=5F90B8FD",

This is an appropriate thumbnail for this video.

When I run the video URL through Google's Rich Results tester I get a different ThumbnailURL: https://lookaside.fbsbx.com/lookaside/crawler/media/?media_id=10152675950170686&get_thumbnail=1

This redirects to to the video page on Facebook--at least it does so on a browser and with curl:

< HTTP/2 302
< vary: Accept-Encoding
< pragma: no-cache
< location: https://www.facebook.com/CIPEDC/videos/10152675950170686/?is_lookaside=1

It's possible that Facebook responds with a different  URL or redirect based on user-agent, of course.

I also ran this through LinkedIn's post inspector. It picked up the same image as GOogle but can't render it:
https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/inspect/https:%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FCIPEDC%2Fvideos%2F10152675950170686%2F

mickey

[seoelevated]

This is very interesting, and I see from the threads you linked that multiple businesses are having the same problem and the same difficulty navigating both the Google or Facebook support communities. Out of curiosity, are you able to inspect one of your Facebook pages whcih still has the video, and see if any schema for the type "VideoObject" is included in the page, and if so, paste the markup here (redacted as necessary)? I don't think I'll probably be able to help much on this, but perhaps something in the schema data might give some clues to the community here to work with.