How to avoid becoming a victim of the YouTube Slap

There are a bunch of suggestions on how to avoid having YouTube take down your accounts. A lot are extremely accurate, but a few I beleive to be a bit off.

Here are the suggestions that I think people are dead right about:

1. You should only have one email address associated with each account
2. You should never post duplicate content
3. You should always make your videos relevant
4. You should never purchase views
5. You should never ever use software to add friends, comments or ratings automatically
6. You shouldn’t keyword load your descriptions with non relevant search terms

Here are a few suggestions that I think people are wrong about:

1. Multiple accounts will be deleted when using the same IP — We think that this is very unlikely because of the large amount of Universities and other public locations that share IP addresses. Also, many family members have individual accounts. If YouTube was going to start shutting down accounts using the same IP, then to many accounts would get shut down. As a result, to many people would get upset and likely switch over to another popular video sharing site like Revver or MegaVideo.
2. You are in danger if you are pitching affiliate programs or network marketing opportunities — We think that YouTube is o.k. with you doing this as long as you provide good content and obey the 6 suggestions above (Plus we have numberous affiliate marketing videos and network marketing videos that have not been taken done because of YouTube’s slap)

Here is one HUGE suggestion that I believe 100% to be true that I see nobody else talking about:

• YouTube will link your accounts together if you are placing the same URLs in the descriptions for multiple accounts

This means that if you do plan on having and creating multiple accounts, and you don’t want YouTube to associate one account with the other, then my best suggestions are to:

1. Only put the URL to your website on the descriptions for one of your channels
2. Always sign up for a new account with a different email address
3. If you are extra concerned about IPs then use proxy services

Here’s one more thing to keep in mind that nobody is really talking about:

• With YouTube’s new insight feature, they are tracking the attention people are giving to each video. If people are watching your entire video, YouTube can see this and then easily assume that your title is extremely relevant to the information on the video. As a result, YouTube will rank your video higher. If YouTube decided to rank a bunch of your videos high knowing that your videos are relevant, then they really have no reason to take down your account. This goes back to the concept of providing good content, which as everyone is figuring out, is exactly what Google wants.

Hope this info helps!

Michael Dunbar