VideoRetailer.org - Exploring the Intersection of Video and e-Commerce.

Many retailers hope to significantly boost their product page PageRank by adding video to it - betting on the fact that Google favors pages with video embedded in their search algorithm. I have seen anecdotal evidence that it is indeed true - although no one has published a repeatable formula yet, SEO after all is more art than science.

Another common practice for retailers and manufacturers is to publish their videos to YouTube. If you ask around what is driving these marketers to share on YouTube, you’ll likely hear that a) YouTube is the second most popular search engine, b) It’s potentially a lot of traffic, and c) it doesn’t cost anything (free advertising).

On the flip side I have been hearing more and more recently about “product page SEO concerns” - when a video is published to both the product page, and to YouTube. The argument usually goes like this - “I’ve read somewhere that Google favors video by inflating PageRank, resulting in up to a 50x boost in search engine visibility” (whatever that means). “So if I put my video on YouTube, the risk of the YouTube outranking my own product page is high - bumping my position on the SERP down. That’s why we stopped pushing videos to YouTube”.

The cannibalization story is certainly believable and the explanation makes sense if indeed Google has some bias to artificially inflate the PageRank of pages with video. At the same time, I have observed that the most successful retailers with video usually have a very
aggressive YouTube strategy, where every piece of content is pushed to YouTube, without evidence of SEO cannibalization. In fact, the perception among these successful retailers is that YouTube provided an extra SEO boost - and here is why.

1) YouTube is a massive backlink magnet, because so many sites, blogs, articles point it. Its PageRank is high - but more important, since YouTube appends any outbound link with rel=”nofollow”, the PageRank credit of a YouTube page is only spread across other YouTube pages. It’s like an echo chamber.

2) If a YouTube page is linked from a site with a high PageRank, it’ll benefit not only that page, but any related videos that are linked from it. In other words, the related videos on YouTube get a “free PageRank credit”.

3) As a retailer, if your videos appear as related to popular videos, they might start showing high on a SERP because their PageRank is high.

4) High PageRank means more visibility on Google, which may result in third part sites finding and linking to the retail site, sometimes directly to the product page.

With this hypothesis there isn’t a cannibalization risk, because when the retailer pushes a product video to YouTube it is not at the expense of the product page, rather, it earns free credit from YouTube. Perhaps a more appropriate term to understand what is really happening would be “incremental free SEO” from YouTube.

In essence publishing e-commerce videos to YouTube in addition to the adequate product page is something I would consider a must. Important also would be to properly tag the video in YouTube and append a good description, since the key to success is to appear as often as possible as a related video in YouTube.

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