Googlebot smartphone does not load videojs video

[tanuu]

Description

My website publishes videos using videojs. Over the past month, Google has de-indexed 80% of my video pages as "soft-404" errors, meaning they have "little or no content" (see https://tinyurl.com/yx9gaxlh). In the Google Search Console Live test, which uses Googlebot smartphone, the embedded videos fail to load due to a video.js javascript error. In Google's mobile-friendly test, which also uses Googlebot smartphone, the video on the videojs.com homepage also fails to load, again due to a javascript error. In very limited tests of other pages with embedded html5 video, videos loaded successfully with no errors. The error does not occur in Chrome developer tools (see below) or in any real world device I've tested on. This issue was reported by Sattar1 (#2400) in 2015 but was misunderstood -- the issue is not whether Googlebot smartphone plays videojs videos, but why it cannot LOAD them and how this might affect Google search crawling, indexing and ranking of pages that use the videojs player.

Steps to reproduce

1. Go to https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
2. Paste https://videojs.com and hit TEST URL
3. See screenshot and javascript console messages (under "page loading issues", top left)
   For comparison, repeat above with, https://flowplayer.com/demos/standard-setup and http://www.casedasole.it/googletest/index.html (basic html5 video)

Results

Expected

Googlebot smartphone would load the video and display it in the screen rendering

Actual

The screen rendering shows a cross (X) in place of the videojs play button and the error message "No compatible source was found for this media".

Error output

The Google results page reports under javascript console messages:
VIDEOJS: ERROR: (CODE:4 MEDIA_ERR_SRC_NOT_SUPPORTED) No compatible source was found for this media. [object Object]"
Source: https://unpkg.com/[email protected]/dist/video.min.js:12

Additional Information

versions

7.5.4, 4.6.4

browsers

Googlebot smartphone user agent - Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) - see https://tinyurl.com/ltj6kod

OSes

Presumably Windows, Android, iOS?

plugins

Unknown

[bcbclifford]

The problem is the Googlebot browser cannot play any video format, so the error is correct - there is no source that can be played. You could hide the error display so the preview renders just the poster and play button. That won't hide the console error, and I'd be very cautious about adding any special handling for Google's user agent.

player.on('error', function() {
  if (player.error().code === 4 && navigator.userAgent === GOOGLEAGENTSTRING) {
    player.error(null);
  }
}

From that soft 404 description, it could be vtt.js being blocked by robots.txt is a factor.

[tanuu]

The issue is not that the Googlebot doesn't play videos. It's that Googlebot is not loading videojs videos. In the two examples I gave (under 3 above), Googlebot does seem to load a basic html5 player and Flowplayer (at least, there is no error message on the video and you can see the play button).

I don't know how Google ranks a page with a video that does not load. But it does signal it as an error.

[tanuu]

Further to, following some webmaster advise I have added what Google calls "more highQ stuff" to my video pages - basically words, words, words. Googlebot is now happy and is starting to re-index the pages. Artificial intelligence in action.

[mister-ben]

Also a PR here to add an option to suppress the message #6057