How Does YouTube Rank Videos For Organic Search?

24 August 2007 Written By: Jim KukralComments: Comments

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If I knew, I’d be selling you the answer. I have done extensive research on this thought and I’ve narrowed it down to one all determining factor.

Quality of Video.

Go ahead, do a search for any competitive term on YouTube and tell me if you can figure out why they rank videos the way the do. It does not have anything to do with date uploaded, that’s for sure. Things that “may” come into play are ratings, subscriptions, comments, friends, etc…

But again, I am beginning to believe that the clear answer is the quality of the video posted. The better the quality, the higher it ranks.

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Quality means both production value and information. Although I’d put the information/relevance to the user before production quality. Take a look at this search (above) for search engine marketing. Notice that the 2nd video in this search is only 1 month old, yet somehow it makes it to the 2nd position very quickly. Now look further at the other videos on the page. You’ll notice that the 2nd video is a MUCH higher quality video.

That’s my guess.

You have the answer? Tell me please.

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  • I've seen some tutorials on it and know it gave me a headache just thinking about it. :) Has to do with tags, description, etc, etc. Lots of tricks just like in how you would code a web page. I'll see if I can find some of the links again for you if you're really interested.

    I just remembering thinking...dang that looks like an awful lot of work for one video. :)I suppose once you are familiar with the layout/format/process it becomes fairly quick.
  • Yeah, I'm interested, send them over!

    But it's about more than titles and descriptions, believe me.
  • Yep, definitely about a lot more than just that. What came to mind off the top of my head. What I've seen was very involved and my brain somewhat seized up. I'll see if I can find the links again.
  • I can't imagine Google is rating them on production value. I'd think the number of views plays a large role, as well as the title, description, and tags, plus the account posting the video and their tenure on YouTube.

    But that's all just a guess.
  • Backlinks and imbeds.
  • Joel, that's an interesting concept for backlinks. But embeds? How can that video get to #2 so quickly? Just by having a ton of sites embed the video?

    Heh, you know, I just checked that #2 video has "embeds blocked". So that means that they don't want us to know where they are embedding their videos, which means they probably dumped the video across a bunch of domains/blogs to boost their ranking. Holy crap.
  • I suppose with google taking over they will revise and revitalise their ranking strategies
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