I did a little Tag experiment

[Capt Jim]

I did a little tag experiment that makes me to question everything I thought I knew about tags. I normally use lots of relevant keyword tags when I'm uploading a video. Up until now I thought this was good SEO and have always assumed that this would help Youtube rank my video appropriately.

With the last video I posted, I did a tag experiment just to confirm it's effectiveness. On my channel and the whole of Youtube there is not one incidence of my real name. If I do a Youtube search with my name, zero videos are found.

My thinking was that if there are zero results in the search now, then if I add my name to the tags and Youtube is using the tags for search weighting then at some point after the video is uploaded then I should be able to do a search with my name and this one video will be the single result.

I used two tags, one with my first and last name and one with just my last name. After ten days of searches using my name, not one result has been found.

Is there something about tags I have wrong or is YouTube just refusing to acknowledge my existence.

 

[Tarmack]

I'm a little unclear what you mean.

http://imgur.com/zhK6GIC

 

[TheBatteryChicken]

I actually came across this yesterday, in one of my videos ages ago i put a tag that said 'ChickenBangedZoella' but if you search that nothing comes up lol

I have given up trying to figure out tags now, I have managed to get a lot of my videos on the first pages of relevant searches though, but some tags just seem to not work at all for some reason.

 

[Capt Jim]

I'm a little unclear what you mean.

There's no problem with the channel name Captmoonbeam showing in results. I'm referring to a specific word or term embedded in the tags section. In my case I used my real name but, it could have been anything. If one term in the tags is not being used as a searchable term, are any of them being used?[DOUBLEPOST=1398611781,1398611409][/DOUBLEPOST]

I actually came across this yesterday, in one of my videos ages ago i put a tag that said 'ChickenBangedZoella' but if you search that nothing comes up lol

I have given up trying to figure out tags now, I have managed to get a lot of my videos on the first pages of relevant searches though, but some tags just seem to not work at all for some reason.

This is making me question everything. Was that really coffee in my cup this morning? Was the woman who made it really my wife? What the hell is going on Youtube?

 

[WastedDUCK]

Maybe youtube only adds tags to their algorithm if it is used by multiple videos? They must have some sort of tags dictionary

 

[chottom]

There is absolutely no reason for the system to pay attention to every alphanumeric string appearing in the description or especially in the tag section. For it your name is nothing but a background noise. If you want your name to matter you must "teach" the system to "respect" it. Repeat it, give it a context (build connections) - make it stand out of the million other strings out there!

 

[TheyCallMeHydro]

Tags are actually the most useless of the meta data in my Opinion, I feel like its ranked Title>Description>Tags. Thus why back in the day of "Tag Bombing" people put the titles of popular videos as there titles and in there description. The only reason this method fails to work well these days is when I was at the private Youtube partner meet up last year in Orlando discussing the Youtube Playbook they stated that Retention scores are factored in now to make legitimate videos rank higher. This is also why gaming channels started rising so fast, the fact that people watch tons of gaming videos in a series that are each 10-15 minutes long there retention scores are threw the roof.

I think having a descriptive description and using the tags you chose in your description should show alot better results when it comes to ranking in search.

 

[HansKaosu]

Tags are actually the most useless of the meta data in my Opinion, I feel like its ranked Title>Description>Tags. Thus why back in the day of "Tag Bombing" people put the titles of popular videos as there titles and in there description. The only reason this method fails to work well these days is when I was at the private Youtube partner meet up last year in Orlando discussing the Youtube Playbook they stated that Retention scores are factored in now to make legitimate videos rank higher. This is also why gaming channels started rising so fast, the fact that people watch tons of gaming videos in a series that are each 10-15 minutes long there retention scores are threw the roof.

I think having a descriptive description and using the tags you chose in your description should show alot better results when it comes to ranking in search.

My thoughts exactly.

 

[XFathomX]

Tags are actually the most useless of the meta data in my Opinion, I feel like its ranked Title>Description>Tags. Thus why back in the day of "Tag Bombing" people put the titles of popular videos as there titles and in there description. The only reason this method fails to work well these days is when I was at the private Youtube partner meet up last year in Orlando discussing the Youtube Playbook they stated that Retention scores are factored in now to make legitimate videos rank higher. This is also why gaming channels started rising so fast, the fact that people watch tons of gaming videos in a series that are each 10-15 minutes long there retention scores are threw the roof.

I think having a descriptive description and using the tags you chose in your description should show alot better results when it comes to ranking in search.

Ive noticed this recently. i have a video that is over 30 min long and didnt get anywhere as near the amount of views my latest video did and I used the same tags basically