Issue: XenForo Media Gallery videos not indexed as VideoObjects by Google

[fionix]

Affected version

latest version

Hi all,

I’ve been testing XenForo Media Gallery (XFMG) and noticed that while videos display fine on the front-end, they are not being indexed by Google as video content (i.e., no video rich results in search).

I ran several URLs through Google’s Rich Results Test, including dedicated media pages like:

https://xenforo.com/community/media/video-title-slug.1234/

Google confirms the pages are crawlable and contain valid Breadcrumb structured data, but no VideoObject schema is present.

This means Google does not recognize the content as video, and the videos are not eligible for inclusion in video search results.

Is there a plan for XFMG to natively support VideoObject structured data?
Are there any known workarounds or add-ons that can generate valid schema.org markup for video content?
Has anyone here successfully configured XFMG to output proper structured video data?

 

[Jeremy P]

We already mark videos in the media gallery as videos and Google correctly parses them as such:

Rich Results Test - Google Search Console

search.google.com

Are you seeing something different? It may be the case we don't do this for embeds from other sites, but I'm not sure how viable that is. The media item you linked is an image, despite the misleading title.

 

[fionix]

Thanks for the clarification!

It’s good to see that VideoObject markup is actually present, I wasn’t seeing rich results in Google, so I assumed it was missing. Upon inspecting the page source, the structured data is definitely there.

Do you know if the gallery handles optional fields like description, duration, or publisher? I noticed that some of these are missing from the JSON-LD, and I’m wondering if adding them could help trigger video appearance in search.

Also, have you had examples where videos do show up in Google video search from XFMG? That would be great to reference.

Thanks again, this is really helpful!

 

[Jeremy P]

Do you know if the gallery handles optional fields like description, duration, or publisher?

We output the publisher, and the description (if the media item has one, the one I linked doesn't). We don't currently track/store duration information, but this doesn't impede Google from indexing them properly. They're able to process the duration automatically from the video itself.

Also, have you had examples where videos do show up in Google video search from XFMG? That would be great to reference.

Kind of contrived, but sure:

https://www.google.com/search?q=https://xenforo.com/community/media/ogg-test-video.3669/&udm=7&dpr=2

 

[Jeremy P]

Just wanted to add I'm leaving this open to investigate if we can improve support for embedded media eventually, but it's non-trivial as we don't currently track whether a media site is for images, audio, or video.