- Do video tags on YouTube matter anymore?
We get asked this all the time, but why stop there?
What metadata does count on YouTube?
Let's test and find out.
[Recording] vidIQ, vidIQ, vidIQ.com
- Tags.
Do they matter?
What should we put in them?
What are they for?
Are they still used?
- We do look tags a little bit,
but not as much as creators think we do.
- Yeah.
- What matters the most to us,
is what matters the most to the audience
and with that, is the thumbnail and the title.
- What is a video tag?
Well you have a title, you have a description.
How else could you help categorize your content
for maybe a piece of software,
that wants to place it in a certain area,
to help people search and find your content.
That's where video tags come in.
Traditionally speaking.
YouTube gives you 500 characters worth of space
each video to create these video tags.
These could be single words, or small phrases,
because there's more than one way
to explain to a person, what soccer is,
or iPhone is, or Donald Trump.
I'll leave that last one to your imagination.
And when you've spent time doing keyword research
on a particular topic and then using all of those phrases
in your tags and seeing the video rank for them
getting thousands of views,
you feel like you've accomplished something.
And then YouTube tells you that tags
mean absolutely nothing.
- Descriptions, like titles, are a valuable piece
of information.
They help viewers decide if they want to watch a video,
but they also let YouTube's algorithms know,
what your video's all about.
- [Narrator] This is the video YouTube
currently use in their creator academy
to explain how descriptions, titles and tags work.
It should be noted, this video is over three years old now
and it does use a small collection of tags itself.
But it does go on to say,
- [Bailey] Instead of adding tags in the description,
add them to the tags field when you upload a video.
And while there are lots and lots of theories
around tags and how to use them,
they're actually quite simple.
Just use the words that make the most sense
for your video and YouTube's algorithms will use these,
alongside your description and title and other information,
to determine when to show your video to viewers.
- Hang on, hang on, hold on.
Just stop there for a second.
So what the YouTube creator academy is telling us today,
is that tags help YouTube's algorithm,
to understand what our content is about.
- We do look at tags a little bit,
but not as much as creators think we do.
- Yeah.
- But they also let YouTube's algorithms know,
what your video's all about.
- Hang on, now I'm really confused.
Now yes, I will admit through some cheeky video editing,
I am having a bit of a joke at YouTube's expense.
What they need to do,
is simply take this three year old video out
of the creator academy, so as not to confuse people,
because this video, which is less than a year old
and is from the creator insider team at a YouTube channel
run by YouTube employees,
is now telling us something quite different
about video tags.
- I would strongly encourage everybody
to spend 99% of their metadata time
on the thumbnail and title.
- [Narrator] This is not the only source
of information from YouTube either
on this new stance on tags.
In a recent Q & A session,
on the Google support forums,
a member of a YouTube search and discovery team,
told all of his video creators,
to focus on the thumbnail, title and description,
and don't worry too much about the tags.
But you know what, I think we spent enough time
trying to work out what the YouTube team
wants us to do with video tags.
Let's ask the YouTube platform itself,
what it does with video tags.
(upbeat music)
While YouTube is the second largest search engine
in the world,
if you put in enough gibberish,
it's not going to give you any results.
Put in a highly searched term, on the other hand,
such as vidiq, and you'll get results from,
not only our channel, our videos,
but all of those video creators
who have mentioned vidiq in their content.
So here's the idea I'm proposing to you.
Let's create a unique, digital tracker,
and see if YouTube can find it.
And the way we're going to do that,
is through a brand new search term called,
qidiv54321.
All right, it is just vidiq spelled backwards,
but I'm always leaving Easter eggs in our content.
Only last week, I made a video where,
if you watch the entire thing in reverse,
you get a complete recipe for chocolate cake.
It really is amazing.
But in all seriousness,
we needed a unique phrase, that only we were going
to create on YouTube, so that we could track it ourselves.
We weren't just talking about video tags.
The full list is over here, but yeah,
we want to put this phrase in all sorts of metadata,
including title, descriptions, translated titles,
comments, even in channel tags.
Yeah, you remember those?
Basically, wherever we think
YouTube may index a search term,
we want to insert it there and see if it appears
on YouTube search.
No doubt, we've probably missed some,
so do let us know in the comments below
and we may do a third video where we test those as well.
To give YouTube a fair chance of finding qidiv54321,
I inserted it into our channel
and onto our videos a month ago and analyzed the results
and this is what I discovered.
Without doubt, the bullet proof solution to making
a phrase appear in a YouTube search,
is to stick it in your video title.
Whenever I changed a title to include qidiv54321,
the video would appear in search within 10 minutes,
if not less.
It's also important to note that if you remove a phrase,
from a title, implications are almost instant as well.
That video may no longer appear,
if someone searches for that key word.
So if a video is getting a lot of views,
particularly through search traffic,
that does support the time honored advice,
which is to not tinker with a video
that is performing well, especially its title.
I should also mention that I tried putting the phrase
at the end of a title
to see if that would make any difference,
but the result was always the same.
It instantly appeared in search results.
Inserting a phrase into a video description,
also produced a very similar outcome.
Searching for it on YouTube would bring up a result,
although it would sometimes take up to 24 hours
to appear.
Also, something interesting to note here,
is that while a video is listed as new
and has more views in the top results in this search term,
a video with the phrase in the video title,
will take priority in search results
over a video with a phrase just using the video description.
I also want to draw your attention to this video too.
The reason it appears in search results,
is because I translated the video title
and description, into Turkish, but only inserted
the phrase qidiv54321
into the Turkish translated description.
Yeah, let me just repeat that one for you.
Even if you set your language on YouTube to English,
when you search for a phrase,
and YouTube finds that phrase in a translated language,
it will show it to an English user of YouTube.
I don't even know if I can get my head around that one.
All right, then let's get on to one that everybody
wants to know about.
Video tags, that don't show up in search.
Now of course, I wasn't going to check this once
by putting the tag at the top of a video.
I'll double check it by putting the tag
in the middle of a video, or triple check it
by putting a tag at the bottom of a video,
or quadruple checking it just to make sure.
I had to quintuple check it for my own sanity,
but the result was the same every single time.
If I put the phrase at quidiv54321, in the video tags only,
that was not enough to make it appear in a YouTube search.
Now of course, this is very interesting.
We'll explore this more a little later,
but first of all, let's go through the rest
of the YouTube metadata and whether or not
it appears in search.
There are two metadata opportunities
when it comes to playlists,
the title and the very infrequently used
playlist description.
You can filter YouTube searches by a playlist type only,
but to my surprise, when I inserted quidiv54321
into a playlist title, or playlist description,
no results were ever found.
Now on to the channel itself.
As keen as I was to test the channel name,
I didn't fancy renaming ourselves quidiv54321
for an entire month.
But I think we can safely assume that it would
appear in search results,
because when we added the phrase to the very end
of the about section of the channel,
that was enough to prompt a search result.
However, when it comes to channel key words,
which astonishingly, you can edit in a new creator studio,
even though with time of recording, other features
such as playlist, live streaming and
translations are still unavailable,
inserting a channel key word does not
make your channel searchable through that key word.
Comments.
I thought I would give this one a try.
Inserting a phrase into one of the comments
on a video, with little to no expectation.
And I was right.
Comments do not add to a video's metadata,
when it comes to YouTube searches.
All right then, I think that's all of our tests done,
so now it's time for the disclaimer clacks on.
(alarm buzzing)
I admit that this is not a highly scientific way
of testing the YouTube algorithm for how it treats metadata.
I'm testing this in a very binary way.
An exact search term, which you won't find anywhere else
and it appears on one channel and maybe a couple of videos.
YouTube is usually trying to deal with very common words,
or very common phrases that can be matched in many
different ways across millions, if not billions of videos.
But I think in isolation, this test does reveal
some interesting results.
The first being that YouTube is always checking
the titles and descriptions of videos,
because whenever you change them,
they appear in search results almost instantly.
And secondly, in isolation, video tags do not seem
to affect search results.
The five that I've inserted, quidiv54321,
into five videos on our channel
and not a single one of them appears in search
for that term, is very telling.
So I would say, in very basic terms,
YouTube appears to be telling the truth
when they tell us that tags don't matter
as much as they used to.
And if that is the case,
that leaves me with two questions for YouTube.
The first one being, video tags used to be a lot
more important didn't they?
Because in your old video you say this.
- But they also let YouTube's algorithms know
what your video's all about.
- And if video tags aren't that important anymore,
then please tell us exactly what video tags
do these days?
- So sometimes tags can be useful if the content
of your video or your channel name is commonly misspelled.
- Okay. - And we haven't yet made
that connection based on people searching for that
and finding your video.
- [Narrator] All right, that's fine.
If tags are used solely to establish
the correct spelling of words,
then please don't put a huge box on the page
and give us an excessive 500 characters
to play with and call it something other than tags,
because video creators are being conditioned
to think of tags as something far more important
over the last decade.
Sorry, I went off on a bit of a rant there,
but tags have been important to a lot of people
for a long time, including ourselves.
After all, we have tools that help you put tags
into your videos, but you've always got to remember
this with tags.
It always comes into the wider umbrella of key word research
and that is still critical.
Even if you didn't do any key word research,
you probably have some good instinct
of what your title should be
and what might be in the description.
And once vidIQ has even a sniff of what you might
be trying to say, we'll suggest a hundred more ways
to say something similar.
A little more specific.
And with a click of a button, you can add those tags
into your videos and remove all of the effort
required from this.
And if you look at almost all video creators
who create YouTube advice videos,
through force of habit, they do the key word research
and they do add those phrases into the video tag section
of their videos.
I personally will always maintain this philosophy.
If YouTube is going to provide us with a box,
I'm going to fill it to the best of my ability,
because if that gives me even a percentage
of an advantage over my competition,
it's worth putting in the hard work.
With all that being said, here's a massive guide
on key word research.
These are all the previous videos we've done
on video tags.
And YouTube, if I am completely wrong,
fair cop, I'll hold up my hands.
What do we need to do with tags these days?
Simple answer, would really help.