What makes a video higher in the search results?

NicsterV

NicsterV

Loving YTtalk
Say I searched for "try not to laugh" on youtube. There are a lot of videos with this title on YouTube. If someone was to post a try not to laugh video, what would they have to do to make it higher in the search results? I'm pretty confused because I see so many of these videos being posted every day, and only every now and then there is a video that stays on the front page for a long time after being posted, when you search for "try not to laugh". What is the trick? Is it the video length? So if you have a longer video and each viewer watches the video for a long time, it goes closer to the front page in search results? Thanks for any help!
 
There are a lot of things that affect ranking. I'd say one of the biggest things is, how big is your channel now? YouTube tends to favor larger content creators, so if they upload a "try not to laugh challenge" it may come up higher in the list than a smaller channel. Other than that, it's keywords, retention time, audience engagement. There are quite a few things :)
 
Last edited:
Is it possible that the length of the video could affect this as well? Maybe if the video was 20 minutes long and a lot of people watched the whole way through, it would rank higher in the search results?
 
AVideoMaker said:
Is it possible that the length of the video could affect this as well? Maybe if the video was 20 minutes long and a lot of people watched the whole way through, it would rank higher in the search results?
Click to expand...
the length of the video has nothing to do with it. retention time does though. for instance a video thats lets say is 1 minute long and has a retention time of 90% will rank higher than a video thats 20 minutes long and has a retention time of 15%.
 
From my experience,views.

Likes tend to not matter that much, since a video can have tons of dislikes,and have millions of views. For example, Justin Bieber songs and Rebecca Black's-Friday. Both have a lot of dislikes,but due to a s**t ton of views,are the first thing to pop up.

Views=Search results.

Also,subscribers count too. If a channel has a lot of subs,it is likely to draw views,which amounts to their videos being the first to appear for a search.
 
BrendenTurtle said:
From my experience,views.

Likes tend to not matter that much, since a video can have tons of dislikes,and have millions of views. For example, Justin Bieber songs and Rebecca Black's-Friday. Both have a lot of dislikes,but due to a s**t ton of views,are the first thing to pop up.

Views=Search results.

Also,subscribers count too. If a channel has a lot of subs,it is likely to draw views,which amounts to their videos being the first to appear for a search.
Click to expand...
u count dislikes and likes together. for viewers its just to see if ppl hate it or no but for ranking they both add up together. i think the old YTtalk admin Michael once told this to me.
 
AVideoMaker said:
So why don't people just upload 1 second videos so the retention would always be 100%?
Click to expand...
why would u even upload anything thats 1 second? u can't show anything in 1 second. + ppl can see the time of the video before clicking they would know its a crap video. retention time is just 1 small portion of what affects ranking.
 
Okay, that makes sense. Thanks for helping me out! I'll reply here again if I think of any other questions, haha
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top