Help Analyzing A Youtube Video

[KempRugeLawGroup]

This youtube video dominates the top search phrases for my area. The problem is that this JUST happened. It wasn't there last week, and the video has only been uploaded a month. Also, this law firm has not been ranking for anything that I have seen until now. It's all just out-of-nowhere.

I saw the WBF about Fresh Content, but there's not a lot of Google News or dates referenced in any of the other results. This video looks like a great outlier to me, but I'm guessing I'm just missing something. Any ideas? I'd love to mimic this success!

As always, thanks everyone!

• Ruben

[EGOL]

Just noticed that this video spam is still killing the SERPs all over Florida.... starting with Sarasota...

[EGOL]

Put him on ebay with a link to those videos.

[Dr-Pete]

There's a Roger on my desk, and I'm awesome, so that's at least two data points

[EGOL]

Thank you Phil.  You are the man!  

[PhilNottingham]

I think that'll be a significant part too - though I think there's probably a few other things purely on the YouTube side that are helping.

[PhilNottingham]

It's clever from a manipulative perspective - so I think the admiration is for the results, not the method.

I personally don't think it's a great strategy and I don't imagine it'll have longevity, or that it'll have good conversion rate, because the video is really truly terrible.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Thanks for the responses and clearing this up for me. I appreciate it.

[evolvingSEO]

I'm pretty sure the back links I brought up are most of the cause of it.

[PhilNottingham]

So... yes, this is basically just a classic YouTube spam attack at reasonable scale. Nothing terribly sophisticated as far as I can ascertain (though I'm not going to out the tactics I see used publicly here).

It's  fairly common knowledge that the YouTube algorithm is much easier to spam than the Google algorithm (in some ways, it's like Google from 5 years ago) and sadly, this seems to cross over a bit into Google organic so that you can effectively get YouTube videos rankings for very competitive terms by virtue of the fact that Google often ranks YouTube pages/videos very highly, yet YouTube is seemingly not subject to quite the same spam detection or treatment as other websites.

I don't imagine this ranking will last (it'll get flagged eventually) and I'm not terribly impressed with the work done to achieve this, though obviously the results are pretty impressive if you're into grey hat/black hat stuff.

[EGOL]

I have not seen anyone have this type of success with YouTube videos -  being able to quickly throw a mass of them up and hit #1 in the SERPs for large numbers of keywords in major markets that are high value terms, normally highly contested.  They captured topSERPs for a service area of millions of people.

These videos for queries like "Tampa (Orlando, Sarasota, etc.) Personal Injury Lawyer" are very similar and if placed on a website in the form of text and images, they would be cookie cutter pages that google would likely filter from the search results.  But, since they are videos they are handled differently by the algo.

I don't know how they pulled this off.  Since the videos are cookie cutter, mainly chest-thumping ads, they really are not contributing a lot of value to the search results.   Is it spam?  That's an "opinion" call.  I'd say yes, when done in large quantities like this.  I am quite certain that if lots of people start doing this Google will find away to put a throttle on it.  They might see us talking here and put a throttle on it.

I wonder if this happened by luck or by design?   The website of this company is ineffective in the SERPs for the queries targeted by the videos.  So, I am not going to say that they are kickingass everywhere.  It could have been a lucky shot.   If I owned that company I would be hesitant to go out and hire a lot of new staff.  I will be surprised if these videos stick at #1.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

I'm a little confused by the responses to this question. From what I read, you all seem to agree that their videos are poor content and essentially, web spam. Yet, you all also agree this a good campaign. Do you all just mean in the short term/ Are they in any danger of being penalized here? If not, does that have to do with different Google guidelines for youtube blackhat/whitehat SEO vs a website?

Thanks,

Ruben

[RobertFisher]

It really is funny. It's like we will go spend money on doing videos and then, we will go to Starbuck's for coffee....  No real effort beyond the videos and they had nailed them re ranking.

Best

[EGOL]

Their youtube videos are doing great... but their website is ineffective for these queries.

[EGOL]

If he can do this he is worth at least a seven-figure number.

[KeriMorgret]

Three more days until I'm on vacation. I don't need it much or anything, ya think?

[RobertFisher]

Keri

You battle ship vixen!!! I love it. Rankin' Roger to the Rescue. I can see it now: Roger comes into a town besieged by sociopathic zoo animals bent on destruction and distraction. While the townspeople quiver Roger goes to work finding ways to show up in the right video at the right time and keep the animals wondering. 
Then, in an evil twist of fate, a crazed gang of hummingbirds corners Roger in a burned out saloon...

But wait, I hear battleships firing of the coast...

Ok, I went overboard... (sorry bout the pun too!)

I love you guys. (And Rankin' Roger)

[RobertFisher]

I have to give him credit as well - he is a bright guy. Don't care for all his stuff, but you cannot knock the fact he is sharp.

Robert

[KeriMorgret]

Let's broadcast this correlation far and wide and see how much money we can each get by selling our Rankin' Roger figurine to people in need!

[evolvingSEO]

Robert

Ha, thanks! I honestly can't take much credit - a few folks in the more grey/black hat realms have been talking about exploiting YouTube's authority and Google's preference to YT for a while. Glen from ViperChill has talked about it a lot: http://www.viperchill.com/new-seo/ - great post, I'd highly recommend anyone check it out!

-Dan

[RobertFisher]

Dan,

I hate feeling this humble.

You have to give them credit it is an excellent campaign. We have to give you credit on the detective work as well - smoking good work there. Thanks for the assist.

Robert

[evolvingSEO]

This might not be the entire picture but they could be using YouTube's high authority plus link building to their profile page and/or individual videos. Moz/Majestic etc might not have picked up on everything, but you can see a bunch of EMDs and microsites linking to their YouTube profile page;

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.youtube.com%2Fuser%2F1800FIGHTIT&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0

[EGOL]

ahhh hahahaha.... ROGER is there!  LMFAO

Kidnap him and find out how they did this!

[RobertFisher]

I found it! I know how they did it. Look at his desk!!!!!

There he is for the world to see! RogerBot !!!!! He's trying to hide behind the blue phone and the perfectly placed valentine shaped picture frame.

Roger Did It!

[RobertFisher]

EGOL, Thanks for the heads up on this.

One thing I see is they like doing video... But, if you look, they are doing other ads around these which has to drive traffic to them. Note the vehicle wrap with Fight-it and FightYourCase.com. My guess is we would see billboards down there as well. With all of the videos they have that has to give them some Google traction action (just coined that one). I too checked the SERPS and they are tearing it up for these terms.

Interestingly, they have 277 videos and it appears almost all are less than two months old and were all put on this youtube channel recently. (there are comments going back further). Frankly, when you look at the videos, they have next to zero content and are essentially webspam. (Yes, they are ads, but content is content). The question becomes, does the massive upload volume in some way affect the way they are ranking? Frequency of that volume, etc.?

I must say that I, too, would love to hear what Phil has to say.

Thanks again EGOL, and Great question to KempRugeLawGroup (I did see you in the SERPs too!)

[EGOL]

Awesome work by those guys.  They are out there at the top of the SERPs for a lot of cities, putting up a huge attack with nearly 300 videos.

I see them at #1 in the SERPS... KILLING THE LOCAL RESULTS... for   "Tampa personal injury lawyer"..... orlando sarasota many other cities.

I would like to hear what Phil Nottingham thinks of how they are doing this.

http://moz.com/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo