Displaying thumbnails in google search results for flash games?

Question

Some sites are somehow displaying video preview thumbnails for pages that contain flash games in google search results. For example search for:

site:www.thorgaming.com game

I see this only on small sites which makes me believe google is not very happy about it.

How do they do it and is it ok with google?

I assume they are submitting thumbnails through video sitemaps, but I can't find any information about using them with flash games. I also run a few such sites through rich snipped testing tool and it didn't detect any microdata tags on a page.

Answer 1

If Google is showing a thumbnail then of course Google is ok with it. Video sitemaps allow you to specify the location of a thumbnail and that includes for flash games.

According to this blog entry http://www.sharingmyopinion.com/2009/08/how-to-get-video-thumbnail-images-in.html

**Does Google show video thumbnails for any other sorts of files beside video?**

Yes. Google will also show video thumbnails for embedded "flash games". If you have a website dedicated to online flash games,

They may have submitted a sitemap in webmaster tools, one which doesn't have a common name that you could find.

Video sitemaps are not rich snippets.