Google (owners of YouTube) has announced that Youtube is going to start AUTOMATICALLY generating captions for some of its English language videos… starting NOW!
Before this, users could add their own captions… but as you would expect only a small percentage of uploaders chose to do this.
What is happening now is that Google is using speech-recognition technology that it developed for Google Voice (in English only to begin with) to automatically determine what’s being said in the video.
The idea of the captioning is to make the videos accessible to those with hearing loss…
BUT don’t you think Google is going to start using this information to decide how to RANK your video in the search engines? OF COURSE!
Now Google will be able to decide how relevant your video is to a particular topic by examining what is actually said in the video, rather than having to trust the title and tags.
It’s only officially being rolled out on a few partner channels at the moment but Google fully expect to automatically recognize speech on ALL videos as soon as they can get the technology perfected.
What Can You Do About This?
There’s not much you need to do right now, as nobody knows how well YouTube can recognize speech, nor how much weight Google will put on this for ranking purposes. BUT if you want to be ready for the changes as soon as they occur, make sure you’re mentioning your keyword phrase clearly a few times during all your videos.
It stands to reason that Google will rely on what IT thinks you’ve said in your video more than it will rely on what YOU tell it you’ve said (via the existing captioning options) in the same way it relies very little on Meta Tags. So although they’ve had manual captioning available for a while, these changes might be just what they need to start ranking videos on the basis of their actual content!
Leave me a comment to let me know how you think this will affect you!
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