YouTube Question Google not indexing my video for some odd reason. Why?

[Nothin' But Gadgets]

So. I produced a 4K quality 4th of July video for my local city display. I put it on my channel and did all the SEO for to the max using TB. I mean, it is ranked #1 under many common search terms on YT. It has been out since 7th and has gotten a lot of traffic from in YT and some FB post on local city centric groups I posted it to. But Google has not indexed it. No, I am not saying it is far down on the list. It is NOWHERE in the Google index at all. Now normally, my video get indexed by Google quite quickly, within 24-hours if not almost instantly. But this video is not indexed at all. And there is something really strange about it as well.

What is really strange is this. If I take the title of the video and go to an incognito browser and do a deep search on the title by putting it in quotation marks, every search result is a video from my channel. What this means that Google has indexed the SEO of the video and associated it with my channel, but not the video itself. I guess this means is that Google does not want to index it. My question is, why? I mean, it is just a fireworks display set to common patriotic music that is on a million other videos. I was worried about the music so I made sure to only use music that I found on other videos on YouTube that have been out for years. I even gave full attribution for all the music in the video, even though none of the other videos on YouTube did this. YouTube has not issued a copywrite claim or strike on the video and it is fully monetizable.

This is weird. Any thoughts?

 

[BraveStar]

Don't post a link of the video here. That would be against the forum rules. However, you can share your channel name or even better link your channel to your TubeBuddy forum's account by going into the account details and adding your channel ID like the image below.

 

[Nothin' But Gadgets]

Don't post a link of the video here. That would be against the forum rules. However, you can share your channel name or even better link your channel to your TubeBuddy forum's account by going into the account details and adding your channel ID like the image below.

Hi. Thanks, but the video is posted to my personal channel, not my channel connected to this account. My account here is for gadget reviews, not fireworks displays. I know it is against the rules to post video links, so that is why I gave an exhaustive detailed explanation for what the problem is. I wish people would just read what I posted and try to answer instead of asking me to break the rules.

 

[Nothin' But Gadgets]

Can't give advice unless I can see the video and look for reasons ....

The video was correctly index today. A week too late. These kinds of videos are very time sensitive. People that missed the show might be looking for videos of it for a few days, but now, they are not. Thanks a lot Google! A whole year of planning and a lot of work, shot to hell because their stinking indexing system screwed up.

 

[Bears and Butters]

We had the same thing happen recently... We posted a video that was uploaded well before.. (we never just upload and go public.. we always schedule).. and we were unable to search for our video by any of it's tags, or SEO content until 12 hours or so later. There are just so many small broken parts to YouTube that always seem to be a bit frustrating to deal with, but are all part of being on a free platform.

It hasn't happened since... but it's just one of those "mysteries" that will never have a real solution.

 

[Nothin' But Gadgets]

We had the same thing happen recently... We posted a video that was uploaded well before.. (we never just upload and go public.. we always schedule).. and we were unable to search for our video by any of it's tags, or SEO content until 12 hours or so later. There are just so many small broken parts to YouTube that always seem to be a bit frustrating to deal with, but are all part of being on a free platform.

It hasn't happened since... but it's just one of those "mysteries" that will never have a real solution.

Interesting. I have never had a video not searchable on YouTube immediately. In fact I just did this today on my personal channel. I have a family Caribbean diving video I wanted to show some friends (they are planning a vacation). The video was uploaded in 2019 and since it is a personal family video, it was unlisted. I made it public and immediately did a search on their Roku device for the exact title, and it came right up and we watched it on their 65" 4K tv.

In the case of the video I am talking about in this question though, it was listed fine on YouTube and ranked well under a bunch of keywords. I knew the SEO was primo on it and it would go right to the top go the Google index once listed, and it has. I know what good SEO is. Once google finally indexed the video, it was immediately ranked at #1 on google search.

The issue was that it took google a full 10 days to index it, when my videos are normally index within 24-hours or less. On most videos, this is not a problem, but this was a time sensitive video. Nobody wants to read a week old newspaper article, and nobody is looking to watch a 4th of July fireworks show they missed 12 days after the event. So, it is #1 on google, but nobody is now looking for fireworks shows anymore, so the video is dead. All my hard work was wasted because Google screwed up. It is too bad because it is a really great video and a lot of local people that missed the show might have enjoyed seeing it.

 

[Bears and Butters]

We agree with you.. this typically isn't the case, but sadly it does happen. Sorry that you had this experience recently with a time sensitive video... that really sucks!!

 

[BensTechLab]

It has been out since 7th and has gotten a lot of traffic from in YT and some FB post on local city centric groups I posted it to. But Google has not indexed it. No, I am not saying it is far down on the list. It is NOWHERE in the Google index at all. Now normally, my video get indexed by Google quite quickly, within 24-hours if not almost instantly. But this video is not indexed at all.

Google indexing vs YouTube indexing will be very different processes. Even though they are owned by the same company doesn't mean they share the same backend index. Google still has to "crawl" the YouTube website just like google will crawl any other traditional website. That is one reason I have a blog/website for my YouTube channel!

1. That google crawling/indexing process does not have a guaranteed or even consistent turn around time. Google will have some semi-fixed pool of resources to do this crawling, even if that's a really big number its still a finite resource to be shared across the web. Let's say for the sake of argument they had exactly 1 million servers running around the internet discovering and indexing things - if the entire world published 1 billion pieces of content that day, they may take some time to work through it all. Therefor bursts of content around holidays or noteable world events may potentially cause a delay compared to previous experiences in how fast something got indexed. The amount of new content published per day is variable and will be affected by things outside your control - like how much other YouTuber's are publishing this week.
2. Now that we know the crawl resources are finite and shared, the next question is how does google prioritize the queue of content to be crawled? Every website, even YouTube, will have something called a "crawl budget". This is how much work google is willing to spend on this website. A small new website with very few backlinks will have a very low crawl budget - in fact some pages may not be indexed for over a month or more! A high reputation website, with lots of good content, and lots of backlinks will have a higher crawl budget - so google is willing to spend more time/resources re-crawling that website more frequently - but its still not infinite! YouTube.com will likely have a very high crawl budget, but that does need mean its infinite or instant. Let's say that crawl budget is 1 million pages per day - there could be more videos than this released each day on YouTube.
3. So if a website has more new content on it than available in their crawl budget, how does google choose which pages to crawl within that one website? Google will look at a number of factors for the pages it may crawl. Those factors will include both external and internal backlinks to the URL to gauge importance. A URL with a lot of links pointing to it is thought to be more important and likely a higher priority to crawl and index. So what makes up these backlinks that signal to google to crawl your video's URL on youtube? Any social media shares that are also crawled, any links from blogs/other websites, and any links inside YouTube pointing to that video (recommended videos, watch next, playlists, featured channel video, friends giving you a shout-out in their video description, etc). All these links signal to Google the relative importance for each URL compared to all the others and helps them prioritize the crawl budget. Note the links get the crawl to happen, the quality of your content is then later evaluated after the crawl (ie: the quality of your video description, title, tags, etc is reviewed after that crawl happens).
4. **Special note about SPAM! Now that you understand the above, you might be tempted to pay for some bad SEO from a sketchy provider who will create a lot of artificial links to your content. You can pay people in low cost countries to spam links all over the internet to your content. It will work for the very short term, you can make google index you very very quickly. But once you trigger their spam algorithms the penalties are severe! Penalties include having your content manually and permanently de-indexed for abuse. The algorithms for detecting spam are somewhat secretive, but it is certainly very very hard to recover from a manual action from Google once caught for spamming - that can take 6-12 months even paying professional consultants to help you. But for the sake of education, here are some of the things that trigger google to recognize spam:
   1. An "artificial link growth" graph over time, if the graph starts near zero, then skyrockets really high really fast, but then stops receiving new links, it appears artificial and not the way normal viewers would behave. An organic link growth over time would be somewhat consistent over a longer period of time, not just 1 day of spamming links everywhere.
   2. "Low quality content", if the spam links are on completely unrelated websites or unrelated videos, it looks unnatural. Normally people link to things that are in their genre or closely related genre. Off topic links will have reduced authority or in mass potentially be viewed as purchased links.
   3. "Unnatural Origin Links" if you get 100 links to your video but they are all from 5 users in the Middle East while your channel is targeting North America then google recognizes that as unnatural audience. They can compare the source of links to all your other videos, or other videos in your genre, and if the video you are promoting is way out of line with the normal link profile it will look unnatural and spammy.

There is lots of AI behind the scenes that can recognize when you manipulate the system. That said a few natural links from you can REALLY HELP. It is totally ok to share your content once on each social media account that you are active. It is totally ok to post your video on your own blog/website. It is ok to post your video in a relevant internet forum (be careful, getting too off topic or violating the rules of a forum may cause trouble). It is also totally ok to feature your video on your channel page for big current events. All these signals will help google to prioritize this video in the algorithm relative to your other videos.

Keep in mind that the above is just going from publish to getting "crawled". After the page is crawled (google reads the content), that's when the SEO for content quality comes in! If the content quality is there it "should be" indexed - although no guarantee on the position in the search results (I am often #30 - #50 even for my best videos, just because I am new and have very few backlinks). Getting to rank #1 - #5 is either very hard, or you have to have chosen a lower competition niche/keyword.

Hope that helps! Tried not to get too technical... If anything about crawl budget and indexing isn't clear let me know!

 

[Damon]

That's why cranking out more videos I almost always a better solution than fretting over a single video. There's always going to be some kind of lag or quirk. Google and YouTube has an army working on these things. In the time it takes to worry over one video, you could crank out two or three more videos. So, for every video that hangs in queue for being indexed, you have two or three more being made or uploaded. In the end it won't matter if Google is a "week late" on indexing something because the sheer volume of videos you produce offsets it.