Help Analyzing A Youtube Video

[evolvingSEO]

Robert

Ha, thanks! I honestly can't take much credit - a few folks in the more grey/black hat realms have been talking about exploiting YouTube's authority and Google's preference to YT for a while. Glen from ViperChill has talked about it a lot: http://www.viperchill.com/new-seo/ - great post, I'd highly recommend anyone check it out!

-Dan

[KeriMorgret]

Let's broadcast this correlation far and wide and see how much money we can each get by selling our Rankin' Roger figurine to people in need!

[RobertFisher]

I have to give him credit as well - he is a bright guy. Don't care for all his stuff, but you cannot knock the fact he is sharp.

Robert

[RobertFisher]

Keri

You battle ship vixen!!! I love it. Rankin' Roger to the Rescue. I can see it now: Roger comes into a town besieged by sociopathic zoo animals bent on destruction and distraction. While the townspeople quiver Roger goes to work finding ways to show up in the right video at the right time and keep the animals wondering. 
Then, in an evil twist of fate, a crazed gang of hummingbirds corners Roger in a burned out saloon...

But wait, I hear battleships firing of the coast...

Ok, I went overboard... (sorry bout the pun too!)

I love you guys. (And Rankin' Roger)

[KeriMorgret]

Three more days until I'm on vacation. I don't need it much or anything, ya think?

[EGOL]

If he can do this he is worth at least a seven-figure number.

[EGOL]

Their youtube videos are doing great... but their website is ineffective for these queries.

[RobertFisher]

It really is funny. It's like we will go spend money on doing videos and then, we will go to Starbuck's for coffee....  No real effort beyond the videos and they had nailed them re ranking.

Best

[KempRugeLawGroup]

I'm a little confused by the responses to this question. From what I read, you all seem to agree that their videos are poor content and essentially, web spam. Yet, you all also agree this a good campaign. Do you all just mean in the short term/ Are they in any danger of being penalized here? If not, does that have to do with different Google guidelines for youtube blackhat/whitehat SEO vs a website?

Thanks,

Ruben

[EGOL]

I have not seen anyone have this type of success with YouTube videos -  being able to quickly throw a mass of them up and hit #1 in the SERPs for large numbers of keywords in major markets that are high value terms, normally highly contested.  They captured topSERPs for a service area of millions of people.

These videos for queries like "Tampa (Orlando, Sarasota, etc.) Personal Injury Lawyer" are very similar and if placed on a website in the form of text and images, they would be cookie cutter pages that google would likely filter from the search results.  But, since they are videos they are handled differently by the algo.

I don't know how they pulled this off.  Since the videos are cookie cutter, mainly chest-thumping ads, they really are not contributing a lot of value to the search results.   Is it spam?  That's an "opinion" call.  I'd say yes, when done in large quantities like this.  I am quite certain that if lots of people start doing this Google will find away to put a throttle on it.  They might see us talking here and put a throttle on it.

I wonder if this happened by luck or by design?   The website of this company is ineffective in the SERPs for the queries targeted by the videos.  So, I am not going to say that they are kickingass everywhere.  It could have been a lucky shot.   If I owned that company I would be hesitant to go out and hire a lot of new staff.  I will be surprised if these videos stick at #1.

[PhilNottingham]

So... yes, this is basically just a classic YouTube spam attack at reasonable scale. Nothing terribly sophisticated as far as I can ascertain (though I'm not going to out the tactics I see used publicly here).

It's  fairly common knowledge that the YouTube algorithm is much easier to spam than the Google algorithm (in some ways, it's like Google from 5 years ago) and sadly, this seems to cross over a bit into Google organic so that you can effectively get YouTube videos rankings for very competitive terms by virtue of the fact that Google often ranks YouTube pages/videos very highly, yet YouTube is seemingly not subject to quite the same spam detection or treatment as other websites.

I don't imagine this ranking will last (it'll get flagged eventually) and I'm not terribly impressed with the work done to achieve this, though obviously the results are pretty impressive if you're into grey hat/black hat stuff.

[evolvingSEO]

I'm pretty sure the back links I brought up are most of the cause of it.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Thanks for the responses and clearing this up for me. I appreciate it.

[PhilNottingham]

It's clever from a manipulative perspective - so I think the admiration is for the results, not the method.

I personally don't think it's a great strategy and I don't imagine it'll have longevity, or that it'll have good conversion rate, because the video is really truly terrible.

[PhilNottingham]

I think that'll be a significant part too - though I think there's probably a few other things purely on the YouTube side that are helping.

[EGOL]

Thank you Phil.  You are the man!  

[Dr-Pete]

There's a Roger on my desk, and I'm awesome, so that's at least two data points

[EGOL]

Put him on ebay with a link to those videos.

[EGOL]

Just noticed that this video spam is still killing the SERPs all over Florida.... starting with Sarasota...