Please solve this Youtube mystery for me..

Does link building improve youtube video ranking?

I think not and i never saw any results before, so i quit doing it.
I think(based on my experience) only embedding the video improves ranking.

Please share your experience...should i build links or not?

Does anyone have any opinion on this?
Any help appreciated!

Opinion is divided and it's extremely difficult to test. Embeds and embed views most definitely count but backlinks is a bit more difficult to measure and it assumes some connectedness between G and YT (which are most likely run as completely separate business units).

If you can create backlinks easily then I would say go for it, if for no other reason than to get free views. eg. if you do some xrumer blasts then, assuming YT doesn't take your vids down for complaints, you will get a bunch of autoplay views on your vids from people on forums checking out your links. And as we all know, view count is pivotal in getting YT vids to rank.

Autumn said:

Opinion is divided and it's extremely difficult to test. Embeds and embed views most definitely count but backlinks is a bit more difficult to measure and it assumes some connectedness between G and YT (which are most likely run as completely separate business units).

If you can create backlinks easily then I would say go for it, if for no other reason than to get free views. eg. if you do some xrumer blasts then, assuming YT doesn't take your vids down for complaints, you will get a bunch of autoplay views on your vids from people on forums checking out your links. And as we all know, view count is pivotal in getting YT vids to rank.

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Thanks for the reply Autumn! I will test this further..

Oh yeah... Another thing to consider is that while backlinks may / may not play a role in ranking on Youtube, good keyword anchor text links most probably DO play a role in getting you into the top video spots for organic searches on Google (ie. the video results displayed in the Google serps). Which would have a feedback effect of creating more views and pumping up your results on YT etc etc... It's a tricky issue.

Autumn said:

Oh yeah... Another thing to consider is that while backlinks may / may not play a role in ranking on Youtube, good keyword anchor text links most probably DO play a role in getting you into the top video spots for organic searches on Google (ie. the video results displayed in the Google serps). Which would have a feedback effect of creating more views and pumping up your results on YT etc etc... It's a tricky issue.

Click to expand...

Yes I think so too.
it's all connected in some way, but backlinks have no direct effect.

I was on youtube the other day studying a particular keyword using market samurai, yahoo and the funny thing was that in the top 2 spots the videos had no backlinks nor did they have any page rank. (Remember This) Although the videos were listed in the yahoo directory it did not make sense why these two videos showed up in the first and second spot. It has to be because of the embedding but the bad thing about embedding is that I don't know of anyway to track what website they were embedded on. Three days earlier those videos were not there and then poof they magically appeared. The other funny thing is that I copied their back linking strategy, posted a comment on a blog that didn't show other comments, maybe this tipped him off and made him add two more videos on two different accounts.