This is how YouTube search works, as explained by Google

The reason we all are here in the SEO industry is to understand how search algorithms work and how they tend to affect the rankings of a website and what are the things you need to do in order to fix the problems or do better. But if we all knew how search algorithms work and what are the things that need to be done for guaranteed results then we all would have had millions of websites on the internet and the world would not be what it is right now. Well, that might be an exaggeration but we mean to say that the industry would have been the most saturated and there would not be room for new people to grow.

Having said that, we are glad that majority of the people are not aware of how search works and we are all trying to understand how stuff works by trial and error method. But Google has just done something that we never expected which is to open up resources and explain us how search works. But before you get excited, this is not Google Search we are talking about but YouTube Search. The resources published by Google reveal that YouTube Search is dependent on three major factors which are

• Relevance
• Engagement
• Quality

While we did expect Google to not go into specific details, they explain that relevance means to use some pointers “such as the title, tags, description, and video content itself”. When it comes to engagement, we all know by now that YouTube counts likes/dislikes and comments as engagement and more of that means that your video’s relevance increases. Google adds that “Finally, for quality, our systems are designed to identify signals that can help determine which channels demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness on a given topic.”