How Important is Textual Content for SEO?

[Tehuti]

I have a website on which I embed videos. Whenever I embed a video, I add a description. The description is mainly for the search engines. Without the description, the page would only contain the embedded video, the site navigation and links to related videos.

Having to write a description for each video is tedious. I am therefore considering omitting the video descriptions. But, then, my pages would only contain videos and no text.

I am very aware of the importance of textual matter for SEO. However, browsing the Web, I have found quite a few very popular websites that only present videos and no text whatsoever apart from video comments.

What do you think would happen if I were to stop adding video descriptions? Would it be SEO suicide?

[netmeg]

Depends on how many other good signals you put out as to trust, authority, quality, uniqueness - you get the picture. If you don't have those, well you won't have much.

[tangor]

For those of us who surf the web with all kinds of things disabled, that text description is the only way to get us to click/allow. Just an observation.

[EditorialGuy]

Think about it from Google's point of view (since this is a Google-focused forum):

If you were Google, why would you want to index and rank a page with nothing but an embedded video if you're already indexing and ranking the video?

Without accompanying text or other useful information, a page with an embedded video is just duplicate content. The "value add" (in the form of accompanying content) is what makes the page worth indexing and displaying as a search result.

[Tehuti]

Good points. I'm aware that it would be very detrimental to SEO.

How, then, do #*$! sites avoid SEO problems? Many of them only have videos on their pages.

[Dymero]

As netmeg mentioned, they might have other signals that are strong. Also, are they using YouTube? If they're using a hosted solution that isn't YT, that can allow them to rank better because they're not competing with Google's own property.

[bluntforce]

I am very aware of the importance of textual matter for SEO. However, browsing the Web, I have found quite a few very popular websites that only present videos and no text whatsoever apart from video comments.

So it's possible to have a successful/popular video website with no text other than comments.

I'd look closer at how fast comments are placed on pages and determine if your site can emulate those other sites. Then improve over what they are doing rather than chasing their approach.

[tangor]

Relying on UGC can lead to problems, so if that is a direction of choice, do make all attempts to monitor that output... even Youtube closed down their comments to logged in members only.