Are tags becoming irrelevant? New info from YouTube.

S

Sabrina

I'm going outside now.
There was a recent thread in which HambyGirl said that her YouTube contact told her how titles and descriptions are FAR MORE important than tags.

Then, YouTube took away the "suggested tags" feature and they explain it like this:
screenshot_yt_on_tags.png

This is from Derral Eves' latest video and although he concludes that tags are still just as important, I don't get that impression at all! To me it says "We don't really care about tags anymore, but use them if you insist."

Generally on the internet, tags are used to describe content, so this new use for keywords of lesser importance is kinda strange. It makes me think they want to get rid of the tags feature completely.

What do you think?
 
If this is the case, then YouTube is getting too annoying. YouTube removed the RESPONSE video feature, we accepted but this TAG change will disintegrate the video rankings. I hope this is not true at all.
 
SabrinaKom said:
There was a recent thread in which HambyGirl said that her YouTube contact told her how titles and descriptions are FAR MORE important than tags.

Then, YouTube took away the "suggested tags" feature and they explain it like this:
View attachment 33803

This is from Derral Eves' latest video and although he concludes that tags are still just as important, I don't get that impression at all! To me it says "We don't really care about tags anymore, but use them if you insist."

Generally on the internet, tags are used to describe content, so this new use for keywords of lesser importance is kinda strange. It makes me think they want to get rid of the tags feature completely.

What do you think?
Click to expand...

It wouldn't surprise me and it's something I've suspected for a while too. Normal websites can still use tags in their metadata, but this stopped being relevant many years ago. It always struck me as odd that YouTube would pay much attention to tags, with the only realistic explanation being that video is a lot harder to automatically analyse than text is. However, technology is now at a point where even if you don't transcribe your videos, the content is picked up fairly accurately. Enough so that between that, the title and the description (which let's face it, are going to be a more accurate indicator of content), tags will likely get the back seat. I can't say that it bothers me too much.
 
This is going to be pretty bad for gaming channels in general I think. Some of us might luck out and do some obscure games or be the first to a game (before someone like PewDiePie make their way to it) but overall, I fear this might hurt smaller youtubers even more.

That being said, it does make sense. Some people have been using the tag features to try to leech off bigger Youtubers, and this pretty much minimizes that.
 
So pretty much it bases search results off of the keywords in titles, so we need to spam our titles and descriptions with what we would use in tags?
 
I agree it's not particularly clear. My guess is that the tags should now only be used for very broad terms but I am only speculating.

I'll ask my partner manager about this next time I speak to him.
 
Jawad Soomro said:
this TAG change will disintegrate the video rankings. I hope this is not true at all.
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Time Jacker said:
I can't say that it bothers me too much.
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I don't think it will affect us badly. If YouTube disregards the tags, they might be doing it to minimize abuse of the system. If someone tries to rank high for a bunch of popular keywords it will be harder for them to write them all into a description that makes sense and has proper sentence structure.

Harpuia said:
I fear this might hurt smaller youtubers even more.
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How so?

Unholychaos said:
so we need to spam our titles and descriptions with what we would use in tags?
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I heard that Google can read on the level of a 6th grader, so if you spam, it might notice... Write for a human!

Crown said:
I'll ask my partner manager about this next time I speak to him.
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That would be great!
 
I just spent several hours yesterday and today trying to figure out which keywords I should be using in titles, tags and descriptions. I've only been doing YouTube for six months, but there is always something new to learn and work on...and then things change. Oh well, it keeps me on my toes.
 
Redford1900 said:
I just spent several hours yesterday and today trying to figure out which keywords I should be using in titles, tags and descriptions. I've only been doing YouTube for six months, but there is always something new to learn and work on...and then things change. Oh well, it keeps me on my toes.
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The same happened to me. I spent a whole day thinking and trying new keywords and changing titles and descriptions.. :shifty2:
 
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