Duplicate YouTube Script Content - Penalty?

[RScime25]

I've been tasked with writing scripts for upward of 100 YouTube videos describing my company's products. In more than a few cases, the products are so similar as to be almost identical; unfortunately, they aren't and will require their own videos.

If I create a "template" script, I would save hours and hours of tedium. For example:

Video 1:

(VOICEOVER) Buy the  ABC widget today!

Video 2:

(VOICEOVER) Buy the XYZ widget today!

So, my question is: Would I be looking at a duplicate content issue? Jeff McRichie's terrific Whiteboard Friday about YouTube Ranking Factors mentioned that YouTube has an auto-transcription feature that might expose my self-plagiarism, and I don't want to get dinged.

BTW, this isn't a matter of my being too lazy to write individualized content; it's more that 1) the products are almost identical, and 2) I have just about a week to write, produce, and act(!) in all of them.

[PhilNottingham]

So..here's the thing...

Your template script will be absolutely fine - as long as you don't put those videos on YouTube, where it could be seen as low quality content and will therefore be devalued.

However - luckily for you, best practice would actually be to not put this content on YouTube at all, and rather to self host the content (or use a secure third party hosting platform) and then submit a video XML sitemap in order to get rich snippets for your videos.

YouTube is an absolutely terrible place to put Product videos as the traffic you get on YouTube is typically low quality (nobody goes to YouTube to buy things) which will mean your videos don't rank will in YouTube, yet you still risk having customers searching for your products go to youtube.com rather than your landing page if the youtube.com url ranks in the Google organic search results for your product.

Conversely, if you securely host the content - Google will only drive customers to your site (and not to YouTube) and the algorithm won't be able to work out that you have lots of near duplicate video content.

So, in short - yes it is a problem if you put it on YouTube for the reasons mentioned - but it's not a problem if you self host. Plus, you should self host this kind of content anyway.

For more information on these principles - have a look here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo and here:http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy