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My website has pages with links to videos. Google sends traffic to these pages and in the SERPs it shows the a video thumbnail next to my result. The video thumbnail chosen is the first video link on the page.

I just realized that these pages have <meta property="og:type" content="video"> in the head. I don't really know why I set the content to video a long time ago when these pages are actually content="website".

But Google is ranking them despite the type being content="video".

My question is if I change the type to content="website" on these pages do you think my rankings will go up or down? Is it too risky to change it at this point or is what I've done a technical mistake and I should fix it? And, if I change the OG tags on these pages to content=website instead of content=video will I lose the image thumbnails next to my SERP results? I think the image thumbnails probably help my clickthrough rate and it's reasonable to have them since the thumbnail video is on the page above the fold.

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  • I don't that using that tag would make rankings better or worse. Google uses that meta data for changing the display in the results (adding the thumbnail.) You could run the risk of getting penalized by Google for abusing the OG tags. – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Mar 8 '18 at 19:26
  • As mentioned it is meta related and there are only a handful of ways that images are used. So I suggest you find out what those things are, since the actual contents of your page was not revealed. You can see when an image can be used here schema.org/ImageObject – norcal johnny Mar 8 '18 at 23:03
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It probably won't make a difference to Google (or Bing). Open Graph tags, while understood by Google, are mainly there for social, specifically Facebook and Twitter (which has Twitter cards but also uses OG, making cards a bit redundant).

There must be something else on your site that Google likes, such as proper structured data / JSON-LD (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/video). I doubt this change will impact SERPs. But I do recommend using Facebook's Open Graph Debugger (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/) to play around with this and see how FB will read it, if there's gonna be a change in how it renders on FB specifically.

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