YouTube; Evolution of Dance Back on Top of Most Viewed

The most viewed top spot on YouTube is the holy grail of YouTube-dom. Recently the owner of the grail, The Evolution of Dance was overtaken by the upstart Cansei De Ser Sexy Music is My Hot Hot Sex. The upstart pushed a hundred million views with a fraction of the comments and favored bumps of the old holder of the grail. The YouTube masses lit the torches and hoisted the pitch forks in rebellion.

The masses were convinced that foul play, i.e. hacking had to be involved for the upstart to reach the pinnacle of YouTube. If hacking was involved, how did the upstart beat the system?

SEOMoz has a recent post by Dan Dover that mentions a number of things that could have caused the sudden overtaking of The Evolution of Dance. First is the keyword tags used by the upstart: cansei | de | ser | sexy | Music | Ipod | touch | commercial | hot | sex | boyfriend | music | apple | nick | haley | computer | Barack | Obama. As Dan explains in his post here some of the keyword tags used need some 'splaining. The Cansei De Ser Sexy Music is My Hot Hot Sex video has nothing to do with Nick Haley or Barack Obama. So a little keyword stuffing was used to enhance the search engine love.

The director of the video, Clarus Bartel stated in an interview with Waxy.org "Never would I have imagined that such an ugly video, made on a whim, would make it to the top of the charts. Believe me, even taking the iPod commercial effect into account, nothing can explain the absurd number of views. I get constant messages accusing me of being a hacker, when i barely know how to turn a computer on and off."

Dan Dover implies in the post that Clarus may not be as computer illiterate as he implies to Waxy.org. All this implying implies that that something is fishy in Italy. Clarus is Italian by the way, I don't know if he is connected. I do know that Evolution of Dance whips his video. Dang! Now this is an opinion piece, goodbye upfront payment.

Dan continues with some excellent thoughts on how Clarus or others, could have beaten the YouTube system and how the system could be fixed. One neat trick Dan outlines is embedding a one pixel iFrame in popular articles. Each view of the article would generate an unsuspected view of the video. Dan didn't say Bartel did this, just that it can be done. Since the uproar, Google has modified the YouTube most viewed list and appears to be making some adjustments to the YouTube Video ranking system.

If Dan is right, the times will be a changing at YouTube. While most of the world just finds this situation amusing, web publishers might find the playing field a bit more level in the future. Dan's recommendations for Intelligent User Rankings, Intelligent Links and Intelligent Views could force more internet publishers to don white or at least gray hats. Check out Dan Dover's post on SEOMoz, for more on this story,it is enlightening.

This article was submitted for non-payment. Associated Content has not reviewed and does not endorse the views of this author. This author does not endorse the views of Associated Content so there!

Sources: seomoz.com, Waxy.org