For several years now, live stream videos have appeared to get extra ranking preference in the SERPs. The generally held belief is a live video is favored by Google’s algorithm.
Can we take advantage of that preference? If live videos get some extra preference in the SERPs perhaps they will pass that extra backlink juice.
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Transcription Below
There is this concept that live YouTube videos are stronger than uploaded videos and there are tons of software out there that allow you to game your recorded videos so that they look live. From an anecdotal perspective, I think we have all seen that.
You do an on air or a live YouTube event and you post it and as soon as you finish, within minutes, it’s on the first page of the SERPs. You get that freshness update factor to it and you are immediately on page one.
It might drop off after a while but you are there. If you have SEO’d it you actually get it to stick or close there, too. At a minimum you get it to stick in the video section on the first page.
So the concept is, if we can do that, does that type of video send more juice or a regularly uploaded video? In this test, we set a Livestream up and an uploaded video and fired links from them into our test environment. The idea of, if the Livestream is stronger, it would leapfrog the test pages receiving the uploaded link.
Carolyn Holzman put this together. She has the video she made via PowerPoint uploaded and the Livestream one. She did the Livestream and immediately uploaded the recorded video and the recorded video actually hit the SERPs first and then the test pages that were receiving the link from the uploaded video ranked immediately above the live stream.
As we were going through, both videos hit and you can see that the recorded one was on top and the Livestream was below. There were no movement between the two – the Livestream video was still below. The uploaded and live video survives up until last week – no movement.
The page that is receiving the link from the live video is not beating the uploaded video. Interestingly, the uploaded video is still beating the Livestream in the video results at the top of the page.
Dori: That is interesting. I heard people sweat that it is the opposite.
Yep, that is what I always thought. So we weren’t necessarily testing that. That was an interesting thing that resulted from doing this test.
In general, I would have thought the Livestream would have leapfrogged the uploaded video. It didn’t. It could be because they were not uploaded at the same time so it might not the liveness but the timing of the upload.
Dori: But the link from either one was not significant.
Exactly, that is the bigger thing. There is no edge, if you will, if you create a whole bunch of Livestream and put links on them to your pages. You are not going to gain.
Dori: That is good to know. Do not waste time on that.