Influency, Back-Up Plans, and When ‘Everything’ Isn’t Enough

Google penalties are a very bad thing. We’re careful to keep our clients’ Optimization strategies on the up-and-up so Google not only sees them as important and worthy of high search engine optimization rankings, but doesn’t ever see them as bad guys. And we demonstrate our work and philosophies by drinking our own Kool-Aid.

YouTube penalties are even worse.

Yesterday, when we uploaded The Daily Influency Video, we were greeted by a couple of problems. First, yesterday’s video isn’t “monetized”, meaning that there are no advertisements running in or before it. And second, we’ve lost the ability to include links in our videos back to the pages we talk about here at Answer Guy Central:

And I don’t know why this has happened.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time researching the issues and trying to get hold of someone at Google/YouTube to resolve them. I managed to find a page where YouTube Partners can submit a support request, but it goes out of its way to point out that YouTube may not respond.

Yes, seriously. We’re a YouTube Partner. We make money for YouTube’s parent Google and have, in a small way, a relationship with them. But with the YouTube algorithm having misfired, we don’t know why, don’t know how to fix it, haven’t been advised that we’ve done anything wrong, and don’t know when, if ever, YouTube will address the issue!

All of that is just background. I’m unhappy, and sure, I’m kvetching a little bit, but the point of telling you this story is to prepare you for this kind of thing happening to you.

Before we get to that, let’s cover something else important: If your web site is in violation of Google’s search standards, there are procedures in place to discover and fix the issue. Google doesn’t make that exactly easy, either, and you’ll wait for weeks or even months for Google to “clear you”, but at least there’s a defined path to follow. At YouTube, no such path seems to exist. So while we never, ever practice Black-Hat SEO and are adamant that our clients do Search Engine Optimization “by the book”, we know how to recover from any penalties Google imposes if The Big G ever thinks you deserve one.

But because YouTube seems to have no reliable mechanism in place for discovering your mistakes, the game becomes about having solid back-up plans.

You wouldn’t host your web site servers in a basement, would you? You have backups of your data, right? Wait; let me repeat that one: YOU HAVE BACKUPS OF YOUR DATA, RIGHT? You understand that on-line-only storage carries risks, of course, and you paid attention when I told you to make sure your DNS records were being handled by someone who knows how?

Then, now that you’re getting serious about Influency, why would you put your traffic-and-business-generating content, video or otherwise, anywhere that you couldn’t control every aspect of how it behaves and performs?

Actually, there are good answers for that last one; we chose YouTube as the platform for hosting our video content for a lot of reasons after very careful consideration of the options. And we’ll explain them in detail in The Daily Influency Video Series. But we also made sure to have “whoops; YouTube isn’t working!” plans in place before we sent so much as a byte of data their way — even though they’re YouTube. Maybe because of it.

I hope you’re joining us for Influency Video. Whether or not you are, you’re always welcome to contact me, here.