Recently, I came across a product for sale with some interesting sales copy, promising all sorts of benefits to someone who wanted to create a website and monetize it. Part of the “feature” of this product was the ability to use keywords, and populate a website with lists of Youtube videos including the descriptions that were provided by the Youtube video uploader.
While there is nothing wrong with embedding a youtube video in a blog post or website article, you most definitely could get into some bad books with Google if you have a big part of your website that simply “scrapes” or “harvests” Youtube videos. The particular product sales copy that I saw referred to it as “harvesting.”
It’s unfortunate that so many people get taken advantage of with such products, especially when they are marketed in such a way as to make the reader believe that creating a website with lots of good content that will get picked up by the search engines, and then rank highly. It is simply not true. Life – and search engines – don’t work that way. And Google especially does not like you “scraping” content from other places, and using that as a big part of your site. It’s not original, it adds no new value, and you simply will not maintain any great search engine rankings with this kind of endeavor.
Indeed, it is quite possible that Google and other search engines will de-list you from their index if you engage in such a thing. I’d highly recommend that if you’ve bought a product that teaches you to build a website in this manner, that you request a refund asap.
Be careful what you buy. Be careful about believing hyped up sales copy letters (or hyped up sales videos) that seem to promise you the moon with the click of a button. You are absolutely not going to get high rankings from google with a few clicks of a website creation product or software. It just does not happen that way.
Hopefully, if you’ve hired an SEO firm, this is not something they’ve recommended that you do for your on-site search engine optimization!
There is so much confusion and utter nonsense out in the SEO world about video and how it will help your website’s search engine rankings – most of the information is completely and utterly false. Don’t get me wrong; video can be helpful in driving traffic to your website – but sticking up a few videos on Youtube probably won’t have much effect on your website’s search engine rankings, if that is all you are doing.
And definitely, there is no “one click” solution that will suddenly see you ranking on Page 1 – especially not any “solution” where the major component is scraping or harvesting content from other sites. That will just see you waste time and money.