Using YouTube Videos for SEO

Hi all,

I have a quick question about using videos in articles on your money site or in web 2.0 posts. I did a quick search and couldn't find the answer but I think its probably important.

Basically, do you need to upload your own video with your own content to get the best effect? Or is it fine just to use some random related video off YouTube? I know for web 2.0 posts it is probably not as important, but if you put someone else's video on your money site will that lead to google realising that the video is linking to some completely different website in the description or whatever?

Sleinad said:

Basically, do you need to upload your own video with your own content to get the best effect?

Click to expand...

This is the better option for Web 2.0 posts.

• Create YT channel.
• Create your own video, using free or paid SW, e.g. Camtasia, Cam Studio, Windows Movie Maker.
• Upload video. Place link to money site in description.
• Embed video in blog post.

This is a GREAT question.

For your own site there is a massive benefit in hosting your own video (via amazon s3) with a video sitemap. I've tested this with customers Panda effected sites and in over 80% of cases it repairs the Panda problem on the effected page.

My guess is having a self hosted video is a massive quality sogn in Google's post Panda algo.

Having a youtube video doesn't have the same effect probably because it's so simple to do.

I agree. I've seen a massive upgrade in my search rankings once I started uploading my own self-generated content. It doesn't have to be the best video, but it's definitely worth more than embedding someone else's.

I agree that creating your own video, making a video sitemap and submitting it to Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) can have positive ranking effects. I have tried this with both self-hosted (Amazon S3) and YouTube with similar results. If you're promoting a blackhat site (or want to stay under the radar from Google), then obviously stay away from GWT!

The benefits of self-hosted (Amazon S3) videos are that you remove control from Google/YouTube, i.e. they can't delete the video.

YouTube's advantages are that it's a search engine in itself as well as a social network. The fact that people are searching for specific topics on YouTube means that you can get additional traffic if your video ranks well and/or is popular.

Thanks for the info guys. I guess it will be much easier to make the videos as well as duplicate content won't be picked up by Google like they could with YouTube. Definitely going to give this a shot, and I will post whether it made any difference, but I am pretty sure it will help me out a lot!