A few weeks ago, Google announced the introduction of automatic captions for YouTube videos (as well as videos shown on Google's video partner channels). This is certainly a big step for deaf accessibility, but some SEOs think that it has the potential to be a big step for SEO as well.

MediaPost Publications quoted Andrew Shotland, owner of Local SEO Guide, as saying:

"Having targeted text on a page helps the video rank in search engines for specific searches… If we're talking about a plumber video, that page will have words like leaky pipe, city name, change your toilet and many others the publisher may not have added to the written description on YouTube. The videos will attract search engines even more. I wouldn't be surprised if YouTube's traffic goes through the roof. The video pages will have so much more text they can rank on."

A look at the SEO impact of YouTube's current captioned videos, however, raises the question as to exactly if and how that will work.

First video chosen (rather randomly) to examine was the US Environmental Protection Agency's "Food Scraps to Green Energy."

I took this caption and searched for it, in quotes, on Google. The results were:

The original YouTube page is nowhere to be found. Are the transcripts on these sites but not on the original? Going into Biodigester, the first site listed, we see that in fact the quote appears on the page itself, as the introductory paragraph to the video.

Maybe not such a representative example.

Let's take a caption from further within the video:

When searched for on Google, the following results were returned:

Still no original YouTube page. Let's see what's in the first listing, CanadaSpace.

I won't give you the whole page, but suffice it to say that the video doesn't appear anywhere on the page – nor on page 2. And despite the fact that it says the number of video results found are 191, there are only 2 pages of results, with only about 10 results per page. Odd.

Let's try another random video. Continuing along the food theme, I picked the rather dystopic "The End of Food."

The captions I tested did not turn the YouTube page up in the search results. What did turn up, interestingly enough, was this:

It's a captioning service. And if you look at the bottom right of the screenshot, you can see that they have the entire text of the video captions… because they wrote them. As you can see above on the original screenshot of the video, the captions are attributed to SubPly.com.

So far, SEO benefits of having a transcript seem to be that if you hire someone else to write your caption transcript and it stays on their site, they may get the SEO benefit. (Important to note: I did check the YouTube video page source code for the words in the videos I checked – none of them had the words in the code.)

One more try. Yet another food video. I'll explain: I went into YouTube Advanced Search, checked off the "only captioned videos" box, and decided to put "food" in the search box. Maybe I was hungry? Although the final video certainly wouldn't have done too much for my appetite. Crickets are not my cup of tea, but apparently they're what geckos have for teatime, as explained in "How to Care for a Leopard Gecko: Gecko Food."

When "want to make sure that you're not getting anything too big" was searched for in Google, the results were:

Hooray! The YouTube video is finally there! Except… hold on… let's check out that "eHow" site, which was the original source of this video. Upon looking at that page, we see that… they have an entire transcript of the video on the page itself. Hmm… Did the YouTube video only make it because of the influence of the original eHow video?

The SEO benefits of captioning remain a mystery to this writer. I tried posting a question in the YouTube help forum, and after a week had gotten no response. I may try more forums, and if I have any updated information, I'll share it in the comments, or if it's good enough, maybe it'll be the topic of another blog post. If you have any insights into the matter, please share it with all of us in the comments below.