YouTube’s Automated Captioning-A New Way to Look At Videos and Search Engine Optimization

12/04/2009

With the recent advent of Google’s automatic video captioning service for YouTube, users will now be able to more readily search and access the site’s visual clips and videos. The state-of-the-art voice recognition technology was initially created as a way to make the site’s user-generated content more accessible to those who are hearing impaired and deaf.

However, some also view the new captioning service as a potentially revolutionary way to expand video’s search engine optimization capabilities.

How does Google’s automated video captioning work?

The recently implemented captioning service combines Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with YouTube’s existing caption system, in order to provide machine generated English-only captions. These video captions are also created using the same voice recognition algorithms that are used in Google Voice, and are currently being offered on 13 YouTube partner channels.

Will “auto-caps” catapult SEO?

While video captioning is not a new development at YouTube, SEO marketers theorize that the new automated captioning service will offer a better way for videos to be search engine optimized, both on YouTube and across various search engines because of the use of text in the video scripts.

Until now, text in videos has largely gone unused, due to an industry unwillingness to transcribe the large amounts of videos. However, with the use of Google’s automatic video captioning service, marketers believe that millions of videos filled with keyword-rich text could now provide search engines with a windfall of high quality pages to crawl, index, and rank. As a result, video ranks in search engines could skyrocket for specific search and YouTube’s traffic would increase exponentially.

In addition, if the video scripts work in the same or a similar way in which embeds do, users who add videos to their sites could also take advantage of the added video SEO, and also rank for the text included in the scripts, resulting in a win-win situation for both sides.

With progress so too comes problems

Unfortunately, as with most developments in search engine optimization, there are those who will see the new video scripts as the perfect opportunity to behave unscrupulously, namely spammers and those who abuse self attribution.

As a result, Google will need to find an effective way to prevent spammers from stealing the scripts and using them inappropriately throughout the web, as well as ensuring that scripts are closely monitored and properly indexed according to content, as opposed to ill-used SEO tactics.