Google Experiments With YouTube Shorts For SEO Help Content

Back in March, Gary Illyes and friends hinted that they may try creating short form video content for the Google help documents. Well, Google’s Alan Kent produced one of the first ones on the topic of why it is important to specify image dimensions.

Here is an embed of that YouTube short (proper version over here):

Alan is giving some pretty strong advice here saying this is a “negative signal” and can negatively impact your Google Search rankings. Here is what he said:

Tip #2.1 Cumulative Layout Shift

Did you know that images on your web site can impact your rankings in Google Search results?

If you have a web page and it doesn’t specify the image dimensions, what can happen is when the image is loaded, the page content with shift around. This is taken as a negative signal by Google Search.

The solution is simple: To specify the width and height attributes in the HTML markup of the image.

In any event, I kind of like these shorts, we do also have John Mueller doing these short formats but not as YouTube shorts for the #AskGooglebot series.

Forum discussion at Twitter.