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

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9 thoughts on “What factors influence video results in Universal Search?”

  1. 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?

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. In my opinion, this is a design flaw. The number of views a video gets and the ranking of the video should play a significant role in how it ranks in Universal Search. I understand it may be difficult to determine the relevancy of which keywords are important to the video, but once these are determined on some level, the impact should be increased by leveraging the view and rank information rather than ignoring this data.

  5. He did answer the question. The person with the question made the assumption that the number of views or the number of high ranks by viewers plays a significant role in the ranking in Universal Search. It turns out this assumption is incorrect. Instead, links to the video from other reputable (and relevant) sources likely plays a higher role, so this would explain why a video with few views or few rankings would still appear higher in Universal Search.

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