YouTube Sells Out; Google Releases SEO Guide

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The economy sucks. You know it. I know it. Google knows it...and YouTube knows it. Well, it seems that YouTubevertorials weren't enough the kings of search. In an effort to turn YouTube into a viable business model, Google has decided to sell top search rankings on YouTube to the highest bidder.

As Erick Shonfeld with TechCrunch points out, the path to more boobage has already been forged.

From Google:

"We think this is a great first step for offering users, partners, and advertisers search marketing solutions on YouTube. Like Google, our philosophy at YouTube is continuous innovation, so we will work to improve Sponsored Videos by listening to your feedback and observing the auction as it takes time to fully develop."

From TechCrunch:

"This should generate substantial new revenues for Google....[It] should also generate a lot more spam results. Google likes to pretend that paid search ads can be just as relevant as organic search results. And in the text world that is sometimes true. But when it comes to video, the sex factor gets magnified, and what you end up with half the time are sex videos no matter what the search term happens to be."

It looks like YouTube just got a lot more interesting.

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On a different note, Google has released a SEO guide for beginners, free of charge.

From Google's Webmaster Central blog:

"Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current."

OK, Google, this is a very nice move on your part. I'm curious to know whether these are really the tactics that Google uses themselves, but it's a nice move on their part. It almost makes up for that whole whoring-out-of-YouTube thing. :-)

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