Thursday, May 24, 2012

nofollow and Youtube Social Blogs

So Youtube has updated a feature -- the "As seen on" links, and some people may have noticed it,



If you can get one of these, this backlink can be incredibly beneficial to your website. By clicking on the link a user is brought to a page that shows all the video content that has been posted to your website, along with a direct link back to your website.




There are several delicious things about this page.

  • Users can subscribe to be notified of all new videos which get embedded to your website,
  • Users can embed their videos onto your website, helping drive traffic to your website from this page.
  • Users can see all the videos uploaded to your site
  • The recommended site channels feed may introduce people on other site channels to your own website.

The "As seen on" feature has been around since last year but the social blog pages -- site channels -- are pretty new.  Clearly I want to create one of these pages for my RPG Fanatic community website. One of the primary purposes of our website is to allow users to submit their Youtube videos. This feature fits my website like a glove.

But there is a problem; you can't just make one of these channels; the pages are auto-generated by Youtube.

I'm still trying to piece together how these pages get generated but it seems to be related to the nofollow tag (which you can read about on Wikipedia). In order for these pages to be created your video embed cannot have a 'nofollow' tag in the code.

My website currently does not use nofollow tags for embedding, yet videos embedded to the site aren't generating "As seen on" social blog pages. There is probably more requirements, possibly having to do with the PageRank of the website.

Another thing that seems important is RSS feeds. It is implied from a post on the Official Youtube blog that the pages are pulling data from RSS feeds which Youtube is tracking for videos. In the case of The Escapist, they have an RSS page which all their various feeds. 

However not every RSS feed seems good enough. I know I've plugged many of my own videos on my blogger and tumblr accounts, and none of them have a Youtube site channel yet. Both blogger and tumblr have RSS feeds by default. My personal RPG Fanatic website has RSS feeds for all the blogs as well.

It is possible that there is some kind of approval process for obtaining one.

Update: Buried deeply within Youtube's Support pages is this page talking about channels which Youtube auto-generates.  A new requirement is revealed; the videos must be trending. 

However, it doesn't explain how you can get Youtube to make one for a website but it's a start.

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