Need Advice Is it true that you are only supposed to add 15 tags with a max of 500 characters?

[Randomlifestylevlog]

Is it true that you are only supposed to add up to 15 tags with a max of 500 characters in total? I heard rumours that Youtube reads only the first 15 tags then anything after is discarded. Is this true?

 

[DamoΓÇÖs Paintings]

I know thereΓÇÖs a limit of 500 characters for the tags, but I doubt itΓÇÖs limited to 15 tags as I went over 15 many times. As for the rumors, IΓÇÖm not sure if thatΓÇÖs entirely true, but if itΓÇÖs just some rumor, chances are it wonΓÇÖt be true, as YouTube Studio has a news and updates section where anyone with a channel can go and check out the latest on whatΓÇÖs happening, I check mine occasionally to make sure IΓÇÖm staying up to date, and to make sure IΓÇÖm not running my channel based on rumors.

 

[Randomlifestylevlog]

Thank you !

 

[Beanie Draws]

IΓÇÖve heard conflicting information. one thing I know as fact is video tags are limited to 500 characters. IΓÇÖve had many more than 15 total tags per video back in the day, but I was using single word tags which was a horrible idea (i didnΓÇÖt know any better) I donΓÇÖt actually know if any of them were actively being ignored, but i know very few were ranking, maybe one or 2 tags per video would rank, coincidentally they were longer key terms, which is what weΓÇÖre taught to go for these days.

the video description themselves allow hashtags but I believe you can only use 3, and if you use too many of them, thatΓÇÖs considered ΓÇ£keyword stuffingΓÇ¥ which is against terms of service. So not sure where the 15 limit comes from. IΓÇÖd love more confirmation of this from @Andrew

BUT in the video tag section itΓÇÖself, if you use good thorough Keyword phrases, within the 500 character limit, it gets very difficult to use more than 15 keywords, so I canΓÇÖt say for a fact if thatΓÇÖs true or not.

another thing IΓÇÖve heard is thereΓÇÖs more weigh out on the first few keywords, and then keywords after that arenΓÇÖt largely important.





One last thing, which is where the ΓÇ£after 15 theyΓÇÖre ignoredΓÇ¥ is there was a solid rumour floating around that if you used more than 15-20 tags on Instagram, your video would get ΓÇ£shadow bannedΓÇ¥ and if you had more than 30 tags, Instagram would outright NOT post your description at all. So you may have heard the rumour from there and misinterpreted it as YouTube.

 

[schoolofselfmade]

One last thing, which is where the ΓÇ£after 15 theyΓÇÖre ignoredΓÇ¥ is there was a solid rumour floating around that if you used more than 15-20 tags on Instagram, your video would get ΓÇ£shadow bannedΓÇ¥ and if you had more than 30 tags, Instagram would outright NOT post your description at all. So you may have heard the rumour from there and misinterpreted it as YouTube.

I think you hit the nail on the head right here.

These rumors are crazy sometimes. It's weird because I know someone who actually teaches others how to grow IG followers as an online course. She swears that she uses every available hashtag (30 I think right?) every time. Statistics show that 8 Hashtags have the posts with the best results, but after listening to my peer, I feel like the reason it's not the full 30 (again, I can't remember lol) hashtags is because after a couple handfuls the quality of their hashtags falls off quite a bit and aren't relevant.

I don't know of any facts supporting any of that, so please don't use that as advice. But the friend who has hundreds of thousands of followers on multiple accounts says hashtag away. So moral of the story; I don't know lol.

 

[SoyManuelMedina]

Is not a rumor, it's even written on the YouTube Help page: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6390658?hl=en

• Over-tagging: Don't add too many tags in a single video. The more tags you add to a video, the less relevant they become for viewers who are searching. If a video has more than 15 hashtags, we'll ignore all hashtags on that video. Over-tagging may result in the removal of your video from your uploads or from search.

 

[Tito Tim]

Is not a rumor, it's even written on the YouTube Help page: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6390658?hl=en

The article says 'tag', then they say 'hashtag'. They are different things. So I had to go read the whole article. The article you quoted is about hashtags, not tags.

I know there is a 500 character limit on tags, and there is a 15 hashtag limit. But I have never seen, in writing, a limit to the number of tags.

 

[Blessing]

From experience. I tag all my video and always more than 15 tags without any problem. I think if there was an issue it would have been flagged by now as YouTube are good at flagging any policy violation. I only look out for the word count and I maximise it to 499 or 500 before I stop. Every little helps.

 

[Simply Simmer]

I try to fill out the space as much as I can by using 490+ characters. I also make sure that those keywords are relevant to my video by placing them (naturally) within my title and/or descriptions. The way I see it, if YouTube offers it as an option on your video - USE IT! Some of my top performing videos are ranking #1 on every tag I have placed, so I don't believe tags over the 15th "limit" are being ignored.