JWPlayer 6.12 and 7.0.0 - Googlebot cannot render videos anymore!!
Hi,
unfortunately the jwplayer 7 videos cannot be rendered by the googlebot anymore which I think is a huge problem.
Our company did a lots of internal research on this issue and finally discovered that this bug appeared in version 6.12 for the first time.
Since the jwplayer version 6.12 the fallback mode is broken and unfortunately this isn't fixed in the new release.
Steps to reproduce:
1. Take jwplayer files for version 6.11 and embed them in your website
2. Go to google webmaster tools and "fetch this page as googlebot + rendering"
=> You see the video player correctly rendered inside the googlebot preview
3. repeat the same process with the newest version of jwplayer 6.12 or 7.0.0
=>The place where the video player rendered correctly with version 6.11 is completely empty now and does not even have a height.
In other words, for google the video is just not there (zero height, absolutely nothing)!!!
We were also able to reproduce this error on a linux machine with firefox and flash disabled.
Even on the jwplayer.com website NOTHING is displayed at the place where the startpage video is embedded.
WHY BOTHER?
In our opinion this bug is quite urgent because on a webmaster conference google openly pointed out that ONLY what the user directly sees (or what google thinks they see) is relevant to search. Hidden
tabs or anything else not rendered on the page is ignored:
Please watch this excerpt starting from 10 minutes and 55 seconds to understand why we think this is so important:
https://youtu.be/tFSI4cpJX-I?t=10m55s
Google's new policy of ignoring content not being rendered to their bots is probably why google introduced the "rendering" functionality they provide in the webmaster tools.
Please go to your google webmaster account, fetch a videopage as googlebot + rendering like described above and report whether you have the same issue.
I really hope we get a fix for this fallback bug as more users check whether the rendering process works for them.
