Embedding Related YouTube Videos May Increase Your Ranking in Google?

Talk about theories! A WebmasterWorld thread has a theory that was posted by senior member, travelin cat, who noticed that his top ranking pages tend to have related YouTube video's embedded on them. The YouTube videos are not his videos, just random videos that seem to be related to his content.

The member who posted this theory seems to not believe his findings himself. He decided to test out his theory by adding YouTube videos to 10 more random pages that previously did not have any good rankings in Google. The results were shocking:

After 15 days, the average Google visit went up just over 200% compared to the previous 15 day period on those 10 pages.

Honestly, I really don't believe it. Can it be some other change that is influencing the results? Could be and of course, I did not test this theory out myself. But it is a very new theory.

So I figured I would slap a video on this post for fun:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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posted rustybrick in Google Optimization at May 29, 2008 7:40 AM Comments (3)

Comments

Which part is unbelievable? That people prefer watching TV to reading, or that Google would give the people what they want? ;)

Posted by Chris at May 29, 2008 15:34

What may be happening is a loop: when you embed a video in your page and people play it, then your page shows up on youtube.com site on the page of the video as referal links (in statistics tab)
So perhaps google is then accounting this link back to your page and it counts for increasing your page's backlinks values.

Posted by James at May 29, 2008 18:09

James there is no loop going on.

One of the variables of evaluating the rank of a URL is how much time is spent on a URL.

If your users spend more time on your URL, Google takes that as an indication of good relevance.

Posted by Rob Abdul at May 30, 2008 10:49