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Video SEO Bullshit – I Call Your Bluff!

By IrishWonder | April 30, 2012

Recently I have been researching what everybody else is saying about Video SEO. The topic being new and hot, it is interesting to see how it unwinds. While there certainly are some good bits of information around (including SEODojo’s podcast on the topic with Carla Marshall and Steve Gerenscer), there is plenty of stuff that cannot be referred to other than pure bullshit – so it certainly deserves its place here.

Video SEO Bullshit I Call Your Bluff!

Search for “Video SEO” in Google and one of the first things you get is an article published two years ago on TechCrunch. Now, TechCrunch is surely not an SEO site so can pretty much be regarded as any other mainstream publication trying to write about SEO (we all know what comes out of it – either something we all laugh about or some site getting banned/penalized). But FFS, if you claim to be an expert on the topic and submit your article to a large publication like this, could you at least get your facts right and word it properly???

Quote:

“You’ll also need to make sure that you have a robots.txt file on all video pages” (via TechCrunch)

LOLWHUT??? A robots.txt FILE on every page? Do you even have a clue how it can be implemented practically, other than maybe <?php include “robots.txt”;?> Should I just email the guy and ask him if he managed to figure out what robots.txt is since that publication? Should I launch an online course called “ROBOTS.TXT FOR CLUELESS MARKETERS“?

How much do you think I should charge for it?

Moving on to other results, that’s not the only one interesting in this manner. AimClear has published a whitepaper a year ago. OK methinks, aimClear is a reputable agency, must be good information, in their blog post announcing the whitepaper we are promised to see “a blockbuster featuring a correlation study of query intent, tagging, and how the combination effects a video’s chances in Google and Bing SERPs” so should be some impressive in-depth study…

No such fucking luck! Pure whitepaper spam! Out of 12 pages of the PDF, 6 are screenshots of Google SERPs and how video results can be included in them, plus there is a list of a bunch of video sites they have discovered – only this list is an image so not much can be done with it, and it has duplicate entries in it too (makes one doubt how accurate the rest of the data in the paper is). The closing points of the whitepaper mention that “aimClear has a rank checking extraction agent. Contact us for further information.” – wait, what? That was just a bait-and-switch to try and pitch your scraper to me?

I can build my own scrapers alright, been doing so since 2005. Another possible revenue stream for me: sell my scraper optimization services to aimClear so that their scraper does not output duplicate results, dohh…

Of course video SEO is a relatively new topic so good information accumulates over time. But as long as people accept bullshit as “expert opinions” under the veil of authority mainstream publications and whitepapers, separating good information from worthless banter will not be an easy task. So many people believe if it ranks on Google it must be good information! The two examples above show how it is not necessarily so. Google is all about rel=author and AuthorRank – how about BullshitRank?

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  • Video SEO Bullshit I Call Your Bluff!

Topics: Reality Check | 5 Comments »

Posted on 30 April 2012 by Irish Wonder

IrishWonder has been practicing SEO since 2000, dealing with both whitehat and blackhat techniques. IrishWonder believes in using the right tools for the job rather than sticking to whatever ideology. Since 2005, IrishWonder has been a moderator at Syndk8 Black Hat SEO forums, and also offers SEO consulting services at irishwonder.com. IrishWonder's latest project is ContentMango.com, an online content shop to be launched soon. Bullshit is IrishWonder's pet peeve no matter where it happens to appear.

has written 2 articles for SEO Bullshit

  • http://www.internetmarketing-seo.co.uk/ IM-SEO

    So let me get this right I need to put a robots.txt file on every page I produce a video on, seems like its another winner from Google displaying the most relevant and correct result once again in the listings!

  • http://www.seoskeptic.com/ Aaron Bradley

    I’m a little surprised that your (very selective) review of video SEO resources skips over what surely must have to the top of your stack, Mark Robertson’s Reel SEO (http://www.reelseo.com – I’m not affiliated in any way). This is solid stuff.

    In this case I think it’s less that “video SEO is a relatively new topic” (Google video sitemaps were introduced in 2007, and that in some ways marks the beginning of the discipline) in that so few people are engaged in it.

    In these situations, yes, it’s easy for bad advice to ooze up through the cracks, as it were.  I think what’s interesting here is the ability of sites and authors with high authority to percolate to the top, regardless of the quality of the specific tactics and strategies discussed.

    And ironically, you’ve helped solidify the TechCrunch and AimClear articles’ place in the video SEO pantheon by linking to them (not complaining, I just think it’s amusing that this happens, “Decor My Eyes” fixes by Google notwithstanding).

  • http://www.huomah.com theGypsy

     Actually Aaron, I used NFs on those… hehe.

  • http://www.seoskeptic.com/ Aaron Bradley

     Ha @theGypsy … a post-post modification methinks (unless I wasn’t looking closely enough at the code before:).

  • Janeth

    It’s difficult to make yourself
    get out and write.  Finding stuff that
    people wrote 2 years ago and tearing it apart seems a little underhanded to me.

    I wrote some articles 8 years
    ago about doing link exchanges however I no longer believe in or participate in
    link exchanges.

    This is a learning process.  We are all learning all the time.