Loop-hole to Google's Penguin update? Anyone else have some input?

[ScentsySEO]

So I have this theory and I’m wondering if anyone else has some input.

I believe I have found a loop-hole to Google’s Penguin update.

Let me explain.

I work for a pretty competitive party planning company. Our biggest competitor for search is also our bread and butter to our company, our consultants. In addition to outside competitors trying to manipulate business from those consultants.

Anyways, one of my top priorities is to not only rank for multiple pages on our site, but to also have our social sites rank on the first two pages.

Recently I have watched a spamming MLM YouTube video review of our company crawl up the YouTube charts and out rank us for our Company name in YouTube search. And now, this week, the video has crawled up to rank 3^rd behind our main site and Wikipedia for our brand keyword!

So how does a YouTube video that is simply a review out rank us for our company name in our social platforms? Mind you he is also outranking our core social sites of which we have thousands of comments and interactions on per day?

Looking at all of the metrics of the video, according to how I believe ranking to work in Youtube, there is no way this guy should be ranking as high as he is. The video has a decent amount of copy, it has fewer than 10,000 views, 76 thumbs up, 5 thumbs down, fewer than 2,000 subscribers and his channel only has 12 videos.

It wasn’t until I was looking at our search results in Seomoz that I realized what this guy was doing to move up so quickly in rankings.

He has 1,671 linking root domains to his video.

He has been building excessive links to this video on Youtube. Well, since Google isn’t going to penalize its own website, the old technique of excessively building links to one page… seems to be working.

Has anyone else come across something like this? Where building excessive links to a video or other social platform substantially has increased rankings?

[CHAD215]

It seems to be that obviously youtube videos rank very well with a good title and tags even without all the views and thumbs up.  I am wondering though how old this video is and how much time was allowed for this person to create these links. Because as we talk about at panfecta when google sees a link spike an action is taken either positive or negative.

Another point i would like to add is that when something is newly published online and the first day you build 1 link then 2nd day two 2 links and so on. So at some point when this guy with the video was building links he could have added a 100 or even 1000 per day and got away with it.

Hopefully he used partial match or brand partial match as anchor text or this will eventually get caught and suffer.

[ScentsySEO]

Ture, but I only wonder because that is pre-penguin and not a social sharing site. I almost wonder how they can regulate link building or if they will try for videos on Youtube.

[KeriMorgret]

Just a quick note to one part of your theory here. Google has publicly penalized Google properties. One example of that is penalizing Google Japan. You can see the news about it at http://searchengineland.com/google-penalizes-google-japan-16541

[TakeshiYoung]

Given how highly Google ranks YouTube, that is definitely a good strategy. I've seen the same thing done with content on Wikipedia, Amazon, Facebook, etc. Basically, if the content is on a high authority domain, you can get the content to rank much easier than if it's on your own site, and Google has a higher tolerance for low quality links to these sites as well.

However, while Google wouldn't hit itself with a sitewide Penguin penalty, there is a component of Google's algo that drops the rankings of single pages or keywords if you overload them with anchor text links. So if your competitor is using only exact keyword match anchor text, expect to see their video drop out of the rankings eventually.