thechilliguy

It's not an unethical hack, it actually helps the YT algorithm understand what category is the video part of. This works especially well in this scenario because kalari is a very narrow niche.

Tags do not boost your SEO at all, they rather help your video appear in the Recommended Videos section on the right of a YT video.

When I tagged competitors I was simply telling YT that it can show the videos to people watching another video from one of KalariLab's competitors.

There are 3 main ways to get views on YT when your channel is small:

1. SEO; 2. Homepage recommendations; 3. Recommended videos on other video pages.

The tactic with tags works only for the 3rd category above.

I hope that settles this discussion once and for all.

Sidenote: I still don't understand why this post was flagged...

Also, this is NOT a blog post case study.

If anyone hasn't read it yet, it's a YouTube case study. Totally different.

Yeah, people are complaining that one of the strategies was using tags and mentioning competitors in 20% of those tags.

But it looks like they aren't too familiar with the YouTube tagging system. No hard feelings, you can't please everyone! :D

The content is in video format on their YouTube channel, publicly available.

We were case studying the YouTube SEO strategy, not the content itself.

That's how the YouTube tagging system works, though.

Kalari is the root of Indian martial arts, it was used in war a few thousand years ago.

You have to practice for 2 years before you will learn how to actually fight. Until then you mainly practice the movements and get your body accustomed to the flow.

Can you please be more specific about what competitors brands have I listed in the article?

Plus I don't understand what's unethical about writing a strategy around a case study.

This is my 3rd post on HN just trying the waters.

I don't know why it boomed like that so this is going to be the shortest case study ever:

We Got Over 1k Pageviews In 30 Minutes Just By Posting On Hacker News

The end