The Michelle MacPhearson Show

The latest on how to rank your videos internally on YouTube and externally within the Google Result Pages. (Got your own questions for the show? Ask 'em here!)   A question from Ashle: YouTube results! Hey Ashle thanks for your succinct question! I’m not sure exactly what you wanted to know about “YouTube Results,” but I can give you guys a couple of tips on the ways Youtube has changed things recently. It also reflects back on how SEO has changed with Panda and Penguin. One of the things you’ll find with Youtube is that because its such a large authority site, it’s not influenced as negatively by Panda and Penguin factors. What that means for you is that you can still do some backlinking work to your Youtube videos and see a positive result from that. One of the great things about Youtube is that most people on Youtube are not well versed in the world of SEO and in the world of backlinking, so if you put in a little bit of time and effort into backlinking directly to your Youtube videos, you can often see an increase in your Youtube rankings internally within the Youtube search engine itself. You may or may not see an increase in your ranking in your Google results pages, it depends on the competition of the key phrase but again often you will see an increase in your Youtube internal ranking. Some of the other things that you can do to get your Youtube results more positive and get more action is using your keywords, obviously, in your title and your video descriptions, and your tags - thats old news and I’m sure that you know it but its worth saying anyway. The other big thing that changed in Youtube’s algorithm is that rankings are not necessarily solely determined by the relevance of videos anymore. Rankings are now determined by the engagement that your video creates. What Youtube wants us to do much like what Google themselves say that they wanna do to serve up the best results for the search term. So, Youtube has determined that if when you search for a video and you see those results and you click on result one, you only watch 5 seconds of it and then you click back. Youtube has determined that that video, when that happens a lot of time, doesn’t have the same engagement as a video where, say, somebody goes back into the results, they try video number two and they watched that one from beginning to the end. Youtube says, “Okay thats the video that when people type in this keyphrase, they’re looking for this kind of result.” If you have highly engaging videos that people will actually watch from the beginning to end, you’ll find that you will rise in Youtube rankings, and this is just the engagement. This is just where the internet as a whole is going, at least in Google’s eyes and at least  what Google is trying to accomplish. Youtube is owned by Google so that's what we’re saying. You’ve got to have highly engaging videos that people were actually gonna be watching to get those top Youtube rankings results this days. So the old idea of the of kind of making robo videos that were read by computer and that just maybe read the script on the screen or something with a dictation program. Those aren’t going to be highly engaging. Those aren’t going to be the kind of videos that we will see lasting in the Youtube result pages any longer. You’ve got to actually be creating high quality content and that's something you’ll care about whether we are talking about video, whether we’re talking about podcasts, we’re talking about articles, thats just the way it is these days. I hope that helps you Ashle and see you on the next one!

Want to know where I am getting backlinks in this post-apocalyptic SEO world? Watch this! (Got your own questions for the show? Ask 'em here!)   A question from Lori: Michelle, I would love to know your preferred source of backlinks if you have one. Backlinks Genie, do you ever use blog farms anymore? If you could comment on that, that would be great. Or do you use an outsourcer? Thanks. Good question Lori - its one that’s one everybody’s mind in this whole post penguin post panda apocalypse that we are currently living in. So the deal is that those blog forums, networks all of that stuff it’s not something me or my team are currently using anymore, why? Because the Google disavow tool. So let me explain to you a little bit of the psychology behind it. I’m not saying that any one particular network is not effective right now. I haven’t tried them all. I couldn’t say that right? But what I am saying is that when person “A” goes and uses the blog network or link building service, like those kinds of link building services. (I’m not talking about like hiring an SEO or an SEO firm to go into some link building), what I’m talking about are article submission services or blog networks or those kinds of services. Person “A” purchases that service, they spread their links out, they take advantage of the service to its maximum extent. Three months later they get an SEO penalty and maybe it’s because of their use of that service, or maybe they choose crappy anchor text, or maybe because they did a bunch of other stuff with some other service that messed up their rankings right? I don’t know why and it doesn’t matter why.  But what happens in that person’s mind is that they go “Oh crap I lost all my rankings it’s because I used this service, now I am going to go find all of those links that I’ve got from that submission service and I am going to disavow all those links using the Google disavow tool”. That lets Google know that all of those sites, all of those sources for links are bad sources for links and lets Google know that those are dicey places that people purchasing links from. So you on the other hand you have been using the service successfully, let’s say for a year  and then this jerk over here goes and disavows all of the links from that particular site. Google says “Okay, okay,  we see that those sites are the kind of sites that people are purchasing links from, so the other people who have links from those sites - we are going to penalize them as well because we now know that that is a link farm.” Of course Google probably won’t do that with only one person using the disavow tool  and identifying those links as spammy, but as time goes on and as more people were hit with SEO penalties and as more people gets paranoid, as more people use that disavow tool and an attempt to get their ranking back. You will find that this services that once maybe were very effective are no longer effective and it’s because people that are using them themselves are cannibalizing their own services.  So you just can’t use this kind of services in today’s day and age of the Google disavow tool. So how does my team go about getting backlinks for my websites? Well, we do some blog commenting, we do some article submission, we do some guest posting. We do all of those things, we do some press release submission. We do all of the normal things, but we do our do it by hand these days. We are not using services, like article submission services, like blog farms that you find out there for sale because of this whole disavow tool problem. And I don’t recommend that you do either for that exact reason. It might work for a little while but eventually somebody else using the service is going to go ruin it for everybody. So use your link building, the money that you have to put towards link building to actually build individual links rather than applying to or being a part of that service like that,