Does Embedding YouTube Video Correlate with Higher Ranking?

[travelin cat]

We were going through an analysis of which pages on our site receive the most traffic from Google. We looked at the urls that had the most hits and decided to find out why they have been more successful then other urls.

These pages are named and optimized for either city, country or other geographic destinations.

The only factor that we could find that boosted ranking was that 7 of the top 10 traffic urls had a youtube video embedded in them. These were just random videos related to the destination page and were not created by us.

Is this a coincidence? I can't see how, I mean 70%?

Has anyone else noticed a boost in traffic to pages with youtube in them? I'm thinking about putting them on every page at this point.

[jimbeetle]

Are those the only 7 pages you have with youTube videos? If there are others, how are there rankings?

[travelin cat]

There are about 10 others, only one of which is in the top 30 of our best performers. Also, those other 10 are on pages that have very competitive terms, the original 7 I mentioned are on much less competitive terms.

[travelin cat]

Here is an interesting thing I just discovered, in both Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer the videos we have embedded in our pages are showing up as links to our site!

I'm not sure how or why this is happening, but it seems as both tools are stating that these videos are pointing to our site, when in fact we just have them embedded in some of our pages.

[travelin cat]

Update: We added YouTube videos to 10 more random pages, none of which had good serp positioning.

After 15 days, the average Google visit went up just over 200% compared to the previous 15 day period on those 10 pages.

[hibernate]

So how do we think Google is finding you?
1) If you have your URL in your info on the youtube page, googlebot is possibly/probably being driven to your site from youtube.
2) If you do not have your URL on the youtube info section, then we have to assume that googlebot found the youtube code on your site and then gave that page some props.

[wanderingmind]

Is it that the page may be getting a few external links due to the more interesting content now thanks to the video?

Or does Google count the youtube video as an additional factor on page-optimization parameters?

[whitenight]

Traveling cat (and others),

You might want to read some of my posts where I'm ranting and raving like a lunatic about how people are missing the side effects of Universal search.

You get it...now let this post fall to the next page, please :)

[ecmedia]

I wish this were true but I find it hard that it is. The web rankings will go crazy if this were true and we will suddenly see that everyone now wants to embed YouTube videos. I think that there are so many other factors that determine a page's rank that I don't think this is the one.

[innocbystr]

Here is an interesting thing I just discovered, in both Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer the videos we have embedded in our pages are showing up as links to our site!

I'm not sure how or why this is happening, but it seems as both tools are stating that these videos are pointing to our site, when in fact we just have them embedded in some of our pages.

This is probably because YouTube lists the the top five sites (by hits) linking to the video in the "Statistics and Data" tab under each video.

[travelin cat]

innocbystr,

Thanks for pointing that out, I could never locate that info. You are correct, we are either the first or second link on the video pages.

So is this creating link juice? It seems so.