We often hear about people trying to “game” search engines and social media sites to promote their content. We hear it about Google, Digg, and others, but for some reason, we don’t often hear about such practices with regards to YouTube.
That does not mean that it’s not happening.. And why wouldn’t it? It’s one of the most popular social networks, and it’s the second largest search engine and the 4th largest web property according to Product Manager Matt Liu.
People are artificially inflating their views on YouTube to make their videos appear more popular than they really are. YouTube is now cracking down on this.
“Recently, we found spamming issues associated with the view counts on a small number of videos,” writes Michelle Schlachta at the YouTube Blog. “The inflated view count number on these videos will be frozen until actual views catch up to the published, artificial, view count. Also, a few people have commented that their view counts are updating more slowly. Occasionally the speed with which views update changes — sometimes it’s faster and sometimes it’s slower. But we are always working to make sure that the final view count numbers are an accurate reflection of the community’s interest.”
There are ways to help your videos on YouTube without artificially inflating views. Luckily, such tactics can also help you rank higher in Google itself. Murdok anchor Abby Johnson discussed some tips with in this exclusive interivew:
At SMX West a while back there was a session on this subject and some pretty useful tips came out of it. Murdok covered this here, and I suggest taking a look at it if you are really looking to boost your video views.