by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, July 20, 2017

Marketers have suspected for years that Google has a strong bias for its content in its search engine. Now a study shared this week found some truth to this view, with 74.9% of all YouTube videos in the data sample tested ranking in the top 10 in Search and 92.6% of all the videos ranking in the top 20 search results.

Stone Temple Consulting published a study that documents the degree to which ranking videos differs on YouTube compared with Google Search, and the appeared bias the search company puts on its own video content.

The consulting firm analyzed the top 10 rankings of videos in YouTube for 424 videos, and then examined the rankings for the top 100 results in Google for the same queries.

For more than 55% of the queries tested, the first video in Google was not the first video ranking on YouTube. Among the queries showing more than one video result in Google, more than 56% of the time, the relative order of the videos differed in many ways.

For example, for the query “12 angry men” in Google Search results, the YouTube video ranked in positions 9, 14 and 15. In YouTube it ranked 1, 3, and 5. Other videos had the same results.

Of the 424 queries tested, about 336 returned only one YouTube video in the top 100 Google results, and the remaining 88 returned more than one video. Five was the highest number of videos returned for any one query.

The findings reveal that the first video in Google Search was not the first video in YouTube in 64.8% of all queries that returned multiple videos. Some 55.2% had a different top-ranking video in Google Search results compared with the first ranking in YouTube.

About 56% of the time, the order in ranking from Google Search differed from the ranking on YouTube. In fact, the difference in ranking increases as the number of videos Google picks to serve up increases.

The findings suggest 77 instances where the video returned by Google in its results ranked higher in Google than it did in YouTube.

The study also lays out the specifics of how to optimize videos for higher rankings in both YouTube and Google, detailing the specific differences and outlining ways to succeed on both platforms.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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