Should You Link Or Embed YouTube Videos To Help Them Rank?
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I recently had a chat with an entrepreneur who was hoping to boost his YouTube video in search rankings. He though that getting links to a video will help the video rank better. I, on the other hand, thought that a YouTube video should be embedded in websites rather than being linked to because when a video is embedded in a website, it creates the same effect as a link does for ranking a website or a page.
The problem, of course, is that Google or YouTube do not tell us what the answer is, and few people outside of Google know the true answer. Even if some people outside of Google do know the true answer, YouTube and Google frequently update their search algorithm. So if someone knows the answer today, it is anyone guess when that answer will become outdated.
My Estimate Of What Will Make Videos Rank In Google
Since we can’t know these things for a fact, I’ll share my estimate which is a result of my own YouTube testing. To help a YouTube video rank well in YouTube search, you should work to get other sites to embed your clip. Also, encourage people to comment and up-vote your video. Those social signals can give your video a nice boost in YouTube search rankings. Lastly, make sure that your viewers watch the video and stay engaged. If people are watching, that is one of the biggest signals to YouTube that the video is a good one. And if a video is a good one, YouTube will rank the video higher in search results. Additionally, you must be able to drive views from sources outside of YouTube. Especially for very competitive searches, your initial views must come either from your YouTube subscribers or an outside source. And if those people give good engagement and social signals, the video will begin to rise in search rankings.
Our Experiment
I was going to experiment trying to embed and link to the video. The video is a cute baby pictures slideshow. But at the moment, that video is #1 on YouTube for searches like “baby pictures” or “cute baby pictures” so there isn’t anywhere higher the video can go in rankings. Here is the video if you were wondering.
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