Video Clips Dominating Google Search Results? And It’s Traffic Generation Implications July 5, 2007
Posted by Andrew Wee in : Google , trackbackSince the official announcement on the Google blog in January, there’s been widespread expectation that video clips would make their way into Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages). But did anyone expect that video clips would rank so highly?
Take the SERPs for Internet Marketer Rachel Rofe:
Her video clip shot during the recent JV Alert seminar is a blurb for The Next Internet Milionaire. Yet it comes in as result 4, a little below her MySpace profile, personal blog and LinkedIn profile.
It certainly looks impressive.
Another search for Internet Marketer Anik Singal, shows a clip from Affiliate Summit 2006 East coming in as result 8 out of 69,300.
This result ranks above his ezinearticles profile page. Pretty amazing.
And expanding the “+ Watch video” tab, opens an embedded player:
So you need not even leave the SERPs to view the video.
Pretty impressive.
Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz also notes that revshare video site MetaCafe’s clips are appearing in Google Video’s results.
If traffic is going to be consolidated at Google’s web properties, would traffic be involuntarily “stuck” at Google or one of its subsites?
More importantly, is this going to be a “good” thing?
Another interesting development has been my discovery of an additional search tab:
For a brief moment, I was able to pull up an additional table with additional options.
I wasn’t able to replicate this result, but it certainly shows that there are more comprehensive search options in store.
Will video be the next step in Google’s content indexing strategy after text-based information?
All the signs seem to indicate so.
Popularity: 24%
Text Blog feed
Since doing the ‘Next Internet Millionaire’ thing, I’ve learned a LOT about video in the SERPs.
From what I can tell, offsite optimization to YouTube seems to play a big role in getting ranked quickly.
In fact, indexing of links to a video happens almost instantly… or at least when the video is clicked on (maybe just viewed) from another website.
I’m actually building a new service-based business around this concept called BizAnnouncer, and I’ll keep you up to speed on all the yummy video goodness I find along the way.
I will say this: reading your post has helped me to define a sales presentation in an area I was stuck on during the last few days.
Thanks again.
You’re right, Google Universal Search is alive and well…especially with these video clips making themselves apparent in the SERPs. Do you think the fact that most likely those people (like Rachel Rofe) or someone else is linking to or heavily promoting those video clips has anything to do with them showing up in the search results?
Andrew, I haven’t seen that extra drop-down. Do you have personalized search turned on so maybe it’s being added because of that? Or do you think it’s just Google doing some additional testing of the GUI?
Hi Bill,
As you know, though I dabble in some SEO/SEM I’m not an authority on the subject. I believe there is some degree of backlinking to the video, but it’s hard to see how Anik’s video would rank higher than his EzineArticles author profile.
Aaron Wall has posted about the “editorial blend approach” over at Are Google’s Results Algorithmic or Editorial. Maybe Matt Cutts might have an answer.
Regardless, I think as the admin at SEF, you’d probably have more of a handle on this?
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Re: Drop Down: You’re right it appeared after I logged into personalized search. Although it was weird because at the time, it didn’t toggle for my other Google search windows. Thanks for the burst of enlightenment.