YouTube Video Rankings

[sunnyujjawal]

How videos in YouTube search results are ranked?

[tedster]

It's a very complex formula, all which is not known. Clearly how many plays a video gets matters, as do links and embeds. The title and description also matter.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

The sounds within the video are converted to text for evaluation so if there is speaking going on make sure it's on topic and clear. I'd rank that right next to title and description in SEO importance.

Google will have learned a lot about how people speak by analyzing youtube videos which is probably used in some fashion to detect unnatural text strings on web pages. People don't stuff keywords when they speak nearly as often as webmasters do when they write :)

[aristotle]

In my opinion videos are "slotted" into certain pre-determined positions in the rankings. This is why they are more often found at certain positions than at others. Google can adjust the parameters in the video parts of the algorithm to get whatever rankings results they want for them.

The sounds within the video are converted to text for evaluation so if there is speaking going on make sure it's on topic and clear

Sgt_Kickaxe It's true that sounds can usually be converted to text. But the visual aspects of a video are often it's most important way of conveying information, more important than just the sounds. I don't think you can directly compare videos and webpages with a mathematical formula. It's like "apples and oranges".

[driller41]

Is there any actual evidence of this, I doubt they would have the processing power.

The sounds within the video are converted to text

[levo]

Is there any actual evidence of this

[googleblog.blogspot.com...]

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Is there any actual evidence of this

Also, Matt Cutts wrote an article titled 'Show and Translate YouTube Captions' on his blog that shows off a youtube feature which allows you to display captions over embeded videos so that you can read what is being said and translate it into over 50 languages on the go. You could be watching a french video for example but read the captions in english.

I'd say they've gone way beyond just knowing what's being said, which is why I suggested that you do in fact need to ensure your words are chosen more carefully. As always: saying 'wow, did you see that? that was so cool' does not tell Google what 'that' was. Be descriptive.

The article even says that processing over 20 hours of video every minute just for captions was a tough challenge but they have the processing power. The process is called closed captions and you can activate them by adding &cc_load_policy=1 to the embed url of your videos or you can click the CC button on the video player itself.

Try it out, press CC and turn on 'transcribed video'. You'll notice they get the words wrong a lot(e.g. isn't that awesome becomes there are some) so if YOU can be more clear they'll get more words right.