Reactive Software Blog

What do you have to do to show YouTube video thumbnail in Google search results?

Just a short blog post to let everyone interested know how to show a thumbnail for your YouTube video in the Google search results (Google Universal Search).

We’ve posted our videos several months back and found them x days later in the Google search results. What seemed strange was that the same search results page had thumbnails next to YouTube entries from other authors. Our entries looked like normal webpage results. Below is a good demonstration of what we saw with our listings:

We were wondering how to get Google to show the thumbnails for our videos too.

After monitoring the listings for 5 months we can confirm that you don’t need to do anything to get Google to show thumbnails for your YouTube videos. This will happen by itself approximately 4 months later (in our case this happened exactly 4 months later).
I think it very much depends on the regular Google index update intervals. New thumbnails might appear only during the major updates to the Google index base.

As for the videos that we did our tests on, we had 5 videos participating in the tests. Each one of them had only 1 backlink from a page with Google PR of 0 (now 4).

Let me know in the comments if you have more info on the topic.

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What is YouTube Hotspot?

At first, I thought YouTube team has invented something like this but for videos (HeatMaps):

At least the name of the feature gave me a similar hint.
It seems YouTube team has finally released an equivalent to Bounce Rate indicator (available in Google Analytics) but for videos:

I was puzzled by the graph and by the feature. The text at the top doesn’t bring much clarity:
The ups-and-downs of viewership at each moment in your video, compared to videos of similar length. Above the average line, your video is hot: it’s retaining more viewers than average and they may be rewinding to watch that point again. Below the average line, your video’s gone cold: viewers are not rewinding or may be leaving the video faster than the average.

The easier way to understand this, is to understand the Bounce Rate first: it’s a way to measure the drop-out rate for any website. Bounce Rate of 75% means that 75% of people left the website after viewing the single first page on that website.
YouTube HotSpot graph shows the percentage of people that left the video at any given moment of time comparing to other videos (of similar length).

How does this help YouTube authors?

For the majority of the ones who post amateur cellphone “streetracing” videos it doesn’t mean anything.
Some of us who care about the effectiveness of what we do this is a great tool to analyse the user reaction on the video and correct any mistakes to make users watch our video until the end. Correcting mistakes is still very difficult because there is no way to replace the video. If you understand that your video needs to be improved to reduce the drop-out rate, you will have to delete the current video and upload a new version. This can be very negative:

• All references to your old version will be broken (e.g. you old video that is embedded at third-party websites will be broken)
• The old version (older than 2 months) was indexed. You will lose all your precious traffic for at least two months until your new version gets into the Google indexes properly
• Moreover, just like with everything else related to optimization, improving the video takes a lot of testing and means you’re likely to re-upload more than once

Wouldn’t it be great if YouTube had a function to replace the video file without losing the indexed page, the references and links?

By the way, the graph at the beginning of the post is real. What do you think it shows?
I interpret it this way: The video is effective and keeps users engaged until the end of the video. The “below average” chunk at the beginning shows that irrelevant viewers are filtered out right away (they understand this video is not interesting for them and leave).

I am sure there’s more to come on the YouTube Analytics front, so stay tuned!

Related links:

• Hot Spot announcement on Official Google Blog

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Some time ago we wrote about the new feature in Google that allows to see several political videos with automatically generated speech transcripts. I was correct when I said Google is soon to index all sound and videos using the speech recognition technology. Just couple of days ago they announced a new service called GAudi that lets users search for text inside videos. So far, search can only be done within a limited subset of videos but the service is still in the “lab” stage and I am sure there’s more to come (e.g. all videos on the net transcribed and indexed).

Several folks have indicated that the speech recognition algorithms currently used by Google are not unique and can lead to some embarrassing moments BUT this is where I think the recently announced Closed Captions feature of YouTube will come into play.
If you know a little about the insides of the speech recognition and translation algorithms (one can argue they are the same if looked at from machine point of view) you will definitely know that the most advanced algorithms use the learning technique (Google Translation service as an example). This is when two sets of data representing the same thing are fed into the algorithm (e.g. same text in English and Spanish) and the algorithm improves upon itself with every new set of data that it gets based on the learnings from that dataset comparison.
Speech recognition and Closed Captions is exactly what Google needs as two corresponding sets of data that can be used to improve the speech recognition quality!
By providing Closed Captions for your YouTube video you will also help Google to correctly transcribe every single word in your video.
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As reported in the Official Google Blog yesterday, “With the help of our speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube’s Politicians channels are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed”.

What does this mean for Video SEO?

I have seen a few blog posts on how to “create your own how-to videos” that recommend adding at least a soundtrack to your video if you’re shy to narrate it.
Well, now there is another reason that will make you want to add the speech to your video. Sooner or later, the YouTube speech recognition spider will start going further than Politician channels. Your videos are next and guess what? The text that will be recognized inside your video will for sure benefit your rankings provided of course that the speech inside is relevant to the subject that you’re optimising for.

Google is slowly building an alternative to old-fashioned text-based website indexing. Annotations are added, speech-to-text recognition is coming anytime soon. What’s next?

Update 18 Sept 2008: As predicted, couple of days back Google announced audio search service called GAudi based on the speech recognition technologies. There is a good discussion point about this new service at ReelSEO.

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Real purpose of YouTube annotations gets unnoticed as people dive into “birth of Long-Form video” discussions

There is quite a bit of noise in the blogspace about the recently-released YouTube Annotations feature and how it can be used to overcome the 10-minute video limitation on YouTube. You split the long episode into 10 minute parts and link them using the annotation at the end of each clip with the URL assigned to the annotation. Google Operating System blog was one of the first to comment on the news, CamcorderInfo has written about it and did again discuss the Long-Form trend, Search Engine Roundtable did a post and so did a few others.

What I feel has been missed is the real reason why Google added this feature to their popular video hosting service.

So far Computer Vision specialists from all around the world have been tackling the recognition, tagging and ranking problem for the videos. We know how to index and rank text-based information, but how do we do the same for videos, sounds, images?
At the moment factors that influence search rank of the videos are mostly based on the information outside the video, e.g. video tags, video title, video filename, text surrounding the video, text of the links to the video and user rating. Theoretically, a totally irrelevant video can have a high ranking in the search results if the information surrounding the video is relevant to the searched subject.

It makes sense to think that the Annotation feature added to YouTube is one of the intermediate steps taken by Google in order to understand the videos much better, provide higher quality ranking and reduce spamming with irrelevant content (questionable as knowing this the spammer could use annotations to fool the system). Unlike the video title, surrounding text and text of the links, the Annotations are part of the video and enable Google to better understand what exactly is being shown in the video.

Few people commented that annotations offered by YouTube lack any style and are not editable by viewers. Of course they could do a much prettier text overlay in any video editing program but that information won’t make it to the index and hence won’t make any contribution to the search ranking of this video.

So think about it twice before you go off to render the annotations in your favorite video editor! Besides, I am sure Google will add some sort of style editing and viewer annotations in the future releases. You will be able to go back and spice up your previous work at that stage.

Update, 1 Sept 2008: you should use the new captions feature to add subtitles.
The rest of the post still holds true - the right combination of captions, annotations, metadata and of course clear speech will help Google to index your videos much better.

Links on the Annotation feature:

• Official YouTube Annotations page
• YouTube adds annotation tool for video creators only, CNet Blog
• YouTube Annotations, by Google Operating System
• Using the new annotation feature to overcome YouTube’s 10 minute limit, CamcorderInfo blog
• YouTube Annotations in Action, SERoundtable
• YouTube Adds Video Annotations (Beta), Webmaster World

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