What factors influence video results in Universal Search?

No Pork Pies from Brighton asks:

"What factors influence a video universal result in Google? - I have the same video, one on YouTube with high views, comments and ratings yet the other one with low views and no comments is the one that ranks - why is this?"

This video is part of a "Grab Bag" series in which Matt Cutts, head of Google's webspam team, answers questions from users. We're not currently taking new video questions, so your best bet for getting an answer about webmaster-related search issues is to head to our help forum: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Google
• video ranking

[rustyvent]

thumbs up if you typed in no results for this search

[daotaoseo]

hi, tks sir matt cutts. i want to learn seo in hanoi, vietnam.

visit my homepage: daotaoseo.vn

[webseoranking]

So i just wonder what other factors than pagerank can affect this ind of things

[HomeAndStyleTV]

Very helpful post. This is great. Keep these coming, please.

Donna Davis, President Atlanta Internet Video Marketing Association

[ailee171181]

Thanks Matt

I'm No Pork Pies (Adam Lee).

Based on this information does it mean that YouTube's embed facility has a negative impact on Universal results?

In the example i gave you the version with the comments and ratings is in YT the other is Daily Motion - because most embed YT it gets less links resulting in the Daily Motion video out ranking it in Universal. If people are hoping to get universal results should they choose other hosting platforms than YT?

[BIGELLOW]

True, but one can also pull this off with links from other sites using poorly written custom blogs and message boards. Wherever technology relies on other technology, forgery is possible.

[adithecool]

The number of views is something that can easily be forged. For example, it takes less then two minutes to write a script that calls the same video with different IP every 10 seconds.

[sayweb]

very good.

[kevinargh]

The odd fact about videos is that Google doesn't count external embeds as links, so unless someone specifically links to your video in text it gets zero link credit. In theory you could have 5,000 people embedding one video, and 10 people text-linking to another video and the text-linked version will rank higher.

It's bizarre, and I don't know if this is a technical limitation in flash indexing or if they've just decided embeds aren't important, but they don't even count YouTube embeds as links

[metallica1987arg]

It's perfectly understandable that that's their approach to ranking videos. They could check the video stats and know that they're real because they own YT and they won't edit the video stats, but think if they check those stats they have to do the same for other video sites (dailymotion, vimeo, etc.) and how would they know they're real? People would submit fake video pages with fake stats to get good rankings if they take that in account.