Does YouTube Embedding Affect the Ranking of a Video? Here is the Truth!
Have you ever wondered that if you put an embedding effect on your video, it will improve your ranking? Then, the short answer is IT DEPENDS. Search engine algorithms will acknowledge embedded videos when crawling pages; however, this element alone does not affect Youtube’s ranking, even though it can help it.
In this article, we will understand how to effectively improve a ranking via video embedding, but before that, a quick recap by explaining what it means by embedding a video.
What is the embedding of a Video?
An embedded video is a video that pulls or borrows the video content from the original platform. If your video is hosted on YouTube, site visitors can watch it on your web page.
You’ve probably encountered embedded videos where the website visitors can watch the YouTube video within the blog post without leaving the page.
An embedded video does not refer exclusively to YouTube, as any video which is hosted on a third party platform and incorporated inside a website, is considered as embed.
Of course, YouTube is by far the most popular video hosting site and in this video we are talking about YouTube ranking, so we’ll focus only on YouTube video embedding and its effects on ranking.
Does video embedding help YouTube’s ranking and algorithm?
Now, let’s start talking about video embedding effects on a video’s YouTube ranking, and whether it possibly serves a positive impact on the algorithm.
The first thing we must understand, is that YouTube must be aware that our video has been embedded. A video embed serves a bit like a backlink to our YouTube video but, at the same time, is not effective if Google is not aware of it.
For this reason, the indexing of the web content where the video in incorporated is crucial.
How to make sure that Google (YouTube) is aware of our video embeds?
At this point, you might want to know how to let Google know about your video being embedded on a website.
Well, there are two ways:
- Play the embedded video on the website; this is because YouTube records each traffic source and, the moment you play the video embed, YouTube will know that – on that specific website – your embed video content has been played. You can witness this yourself, by checking the video’s analytics a few days after sending plays from an embedded video.
- Have the blog post indexed by Google; In this case, the thing might not necessarily be in our control, especially if we have purchased or obtained the video embed from a third party. But as general rule, stick to “real domains” and not subdomains of public websites, where anyone can register. The reason to this is that while the latter hardly get indexed by Google, a proper domain with its own hosting will get his content indexed much more easily.
Now that we made sure that YouTube is aware of our video being incorporated around the web, what can we expect?
Benefits on YouTube ranking of video embedding
If your video has been embedded on proper domains and some traffic by playing the video on the web page has been sent, you can surely expect some benefit for your channel’s ranking. After all, the fact that someone decides to include your video in his blog, means that he found it highly educative or engaging.
According to our tests, YouTube embedding is not a ranking factor that shows results in the very short term, but over weeks or months, a video that will be present all over the web will also increase his ranking among the YouTube platform.
Specifically, after a few weeks/months, you can expect:
- Better ranking for targeted keywords
- More organic traffic from other sources (suggested videos, browse features)
- Better channel’s ranking as a whole
Tips to maximize the effects of video embeds on your channel’s ranking
Video embeds are, in short, the backlinks of a YouTube video. And same as for websites and backlinks, also for YouTube videos and embeds, quality matters more than quantity.
Therefore, spamming the web with video embeds on non-relevant sites is useless and also, these embeds will never be noticed by Google. On the other hand, having video embeds inside relevant content and quality websites, will have a great effect on a channel.
Also, if you embed your video inside a blog post that talks about the same topic mentioned in your video, you can rest assured that the ranking on YouTube search for those keywords for your video, will improve too.
To sum it up,
- Do not spam
- Add videos inside blog posts with relevant content
- Real and quality domains (websites) should be preferred
If creating video embeds is too much work for you or you lack access to websites where you can post your videos, then there are also services out there which make it for you. I tried a few and LenosTube Video Embeds is definetely a good one to go for, which satisfies all the above bullet points.
Are there benefits of embedding a YouTube video, for website owners?
Generally speaking – therefore, without focusing only on YouTube ranking and algorithm – embedding may have a few benefits worth mentioning – including for website owners when they decide to embed a video.
Let’s see the two main reasons below!
1. Embedded videos can engage more Readers
Embedded videos can help you to encourage visitors to stay on the page for a longer time. An engaging video means more people are likely to watch it, indicating SEO that your page has valuable information.
A long text of valuable information on a blog along with helpful embedded video can help you get better SEO ranking, since visitors may engage longer.
Note that this is not a direct impact, but a result of embedding videos, in the case that visitors play the video and watch it though.
This is because…
“If you want your visitors to stay longer on your page, embedding YouTube videos can help you achieve that goal. While reading the full content, they can entertain your visitors for a few minutes. It means that your users will stay a few minutes longer on your web page to watch the video until the end, and the time users spend on a web page is a ranking factor”
2. Embedded Videos Are Valuable
Embedding YouTube videos into your content doesn’t have any direct impact on your SEO ranking.
But viewers like to save time and videos are usually more engaging than a text block, so it’s always good for a reader to have the option to watch a two-minute video rather than reading the whole story, as the latter might discourage visitors to stay on the page.
