What's the best method for posting the same video with different phone and address on YouTube?

[BasementSystems76]

For a franchise network, what's the best method for posting the same video that is tagged with different phone numbers and address per each location on YouTube?  Will this get removed as duplicate content eventually?  Or if I use the geo-tagging feature, will this help?

[EGOL]

Have you thought about adding a simple text screen to the beginning and end of the video?

To really make it unique you could do unique voiceover....   Get these from Hillbilly Widgets in Bugtussle, West Virginia  304-594-3334

[PhilNottingham]

Hi Richard,

The long and short of it is that yes, this will eventually get picked up as duplicate content and devalued, but moreover, if you upload the same video multiple times, you will be diluting the amount of potential views each version will get and therefore hampering the rankings on YT, Google video and Google organic.

Therefore, I would strongly recommend against uploading duplicate versions with differing meta-elements. What is the ultimate goal of these videos? Are you trying to get blended results to YT through submitting video- site-maps? Or are you trying to rank on YouTube for a variety of long-tail terms?

Either way, duplicate content won't be the way to go. I would either recommend optimising a single video for a host of long tail terms by building lots of strong anchor text links to it and hosting the video on a page on your own site which has a list of relevant phone numbers/addresses in the source but only delivers a single one to a human visitor based on IP?

Or, if you want to make lots of videos - they will all need to be broadly different so there is value in watching the whole series for any given user. The best way to do that is to take a simple concept and then just scale it by having duplicated branded wrapping and differing the internal content, such as with the following example, which I built last week: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDCBEEAFF5571810B&feature=view_all

Those were made entirely within one day, without any expensive software, so it is possible to scale unique videos. If you do something like this, then you could add different phone numbers and addresses in the meta-data and tagging. Your channel actually has lots of good unique content, so I think you'll be best off sticking down this route and just scaling your production further.

Thanks,

Phil

[BasementSystems76]

Hi,

I appreciate the thoughtful answer.

It's not to get long-tail traffic.  We create an ad commercial and then tag it (logo, contact info, but the core being the same) for each dealer/franchise location and then they want it posted on YouTube, either in their own channel or the headquarters one.  We have dup video all over the place because of this and I am trying to reign it in and create a good solution.

I figure most of this duplicated video will get rejected at some point, but was hoping that the Map Location feature on YT would help.  If I have 100 of the same commercial tagged for the local dealer and located in different markets, it's logical that this could work.

Your third paragraph seems the best solution -- host an untagged version on YT and embed on dealers sites with relevant contact info.

Thanks again,
Richard

[PhilNottingham]

The issue is, this isn't what the map location feature was designed for. If you take this approach, you're ultimately attempting to trick YT into thinking that your content is unique when it isn't and this will not be looked at kindly by Google. While your approach may work for now, the YouTube videos wont rank very well and you are putting yourself highly at risk of a spamming penalty in the future.

I think the single video option with dynamic page could definitely work, but it might be tricky to get the one page to rank 100+ geographical terms

An alternative might be not using YT to host, as Google can see the analytics info for YT and give negative quality metrics based on the fall out rate of the YouTube vids; which will inevitably be extremely high if it's an advert.

I would recommend using Wistia - http://wistia.com/ which Moz use, as they have an automatic sitemap submission service which is very nicely put together and easy to use if you're scaling the content over a vast franchise. You could upload multiple versions of the same video with Wistia and create unique pages for each franchise location and then you should be able to get blended results for multiple geographical terms - especially if you hook the pages with the videos on to the Google Local listings.

All that said, Google will be able to crack down on duplicate video in the future. Audio wave matching isn't that hard - they already do it for YouTube and will do it for other services in the future. If you can get away from totally duplicated videos, especially on the audio front, it would future proof you from Panda and other dupe content smack-downs. Maybe get a different actor (with appropriate regional accents) to do the VO for each franchise?