About two weeks ago, on January 25th 2008, I created a short movie clip using Windows Movie Maker (haha) to create a simple yet practical wmv file for my MacBook Air Spoof SEO Experiment that I quickly uploaded to YouTube thereafter. I wanted to know how long it would take for my MacBook Air Spoof video to receive 1,000+ views, how long it took for the YouTube hosted video to rank in Google and finally, see how long and how well my MacBook Air Spoof blog post would take to rank in Google SERP.

I discovered that the video page on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2VR28s0lho, ranked higher (5th position in google.com SERP after 2 days) much faster than my blog post did; ranking 25th position after 3 days.

Last friday, February 1st 2008, I did a quick Google.com search for “MacBook Air Spoof” as I had done everyday since I posted and uploaded the video on YouTube, and discovered that my video page on YouTube ranked 2nd on Google.com for that term. I also discovered that my blog post ranked in 11th position that same time.

Today, I did the same search again and found my blog post ranked first on Google.ca Search Engine Results Page (SERP)! however, my video page on YouTube still didn’t rank on Google.ca. There have been no changes to the SERP on Google.com

What happened on Google.com:

1. My video on YouTube was more likely to receive more page views than my actual blog post on my site due to the sheer traffic of the website. YouTube provides, “related videos”, which gives more exposure to the video even if people havent necessarily searched for the specific video and was likely viewed by people watching “real” MacBook Air Spoof videos. Higher keyword density, etc, etc.
2. My blog is very search engine friendly and new posts do get indexed by Google right away. The fact that I was linking to the specific video page on YouTube using “MacBook Air Spoof” & “MacBook Air” as link text in 2 different places helped it out as well.

What happened on Google.ca:

1. Google.ca only displayed 1 video related to my MacBook Air Spoof search term.
2. My blog post ranked first for this search term and my YouTube video page was no where to be found in SERP

Why my YouTube video page wouldn’t be displayed in Google SERP:

1. Google typically only displays two videos about a specific term on the first page of its SERP. An, due to the growing number of videos and better videos that received a greater number of views and higher quality rating when compared to my video, those videos out ranked my video and thus bumped out of its 2nd place ranking on Google; c’est la vie, non?
2. As my blog post aged, was viewed more, and due to other ranking factors such as keyword density for “MacBook Air Spoof”, Google likely recognized my post to be a significant source of content about the search term.

King Rosales is an SEO Specialist in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is challenged to solve SEO related problems on a daily basis. One of his most recent achievements was ranking a local Law Firm website to rank first on MSN Live Search for a specific term. This website ranked first in Google and on the first page of Yahoo! but not ranked at all on MSN Live Search. After he implemented the SEO strategy, two months later, the site now ranks in 1st position on MSN Live Search.