5 Fixes for YouTube Shorts Shadowban — Step-by-Step Guide & Transcript

[00:00] If you're YouTube short-sourced like this, and it always happens, it's proof that you're shadowbanned on YouTube. But I don't want you to panic, because there are five changes that you can make today to immediately lift that shadowban so long as you haven't done anything,

[00:13] to violate YouTube's terms and policies, which I'm going to guess you probably haven't, but your videos are being treated unfairly, and that's going to stop today once you implement these changes. By the way, the last one is by far the most important, so please make sure you make it there.

[00:27] Changeable one is you need to make sure that you stop posting AI slops. This is the number one sign to YouTube right now that, hey, this person is putting no effort into their page. And this means several different things.

[00:39] The first thing that it could mean is that you're posting too much on YouTube shorts. And I know not every one of these is going to actually mean something to you. The first one is going to be you might be posting way too much. You shouldn't be posting more than eight times a day on YouTube right now.

[00:54] If you post more than eight times a day, they're just going to mark your channel as spam, and they're going to think that it's not actually a real human posting anything. The second thing you might mess up, if you just created a new channel, and you just begin posting a lot, that will also mess things up.

[01:08] You want to make sure that you warm up your channel first before you begin just blowing up YouTube. The next thing is if you are creating content that has AI in it, and you aren't disclosing it,

[01:20] you are not tricking anybody. All you're doing is lying to YouTube, giving them a reason to demonetize you, and giving them a reason to actually not push out your page. If you think you're getting one over on Google, you're not.

[01:32] In fact, I can guarantee you you're not, because every single video, especially YouTube Shorts, that gets uploaded to YouTube, is now getting run by Google Gemini's AI in order to figure out whether or not your content's AI.

[01:46] So even if you don't disclose it, they know it. And if you're not disclosing it, it's going to be why you are not getting the reach that you want. In addition to that, you might be messing up a ton of other things, like having a lot of metadata, posting random stuff,

[01:59] or a bunch of other things that we're going to get into, and these are only going to continue to get more and more important. So change number two that you need to make is we need to make sure that you are actually uploading your content with the right metadata, because you could be messing up the tags, you could be messing up the description,

[02:14] you might be messing up the title, or some of the settings that you're turning on in your posts, and those are why your views are getting stuck and it feels like you're shadowbanned. Okay, so when it comes to actually making sure that your metadata is going to be correct,

[02:26] here's what you need to make sure that you're focused on. If you come into your shorts right here, let's say that we scroll down a little bit and we're going to look at this short right here. If we come into the details, we can see that the keywords that I have in my title

[02:39] match what is in my description, and that matches what's in my tags. If I do Command-Find right here and I type in Google Gemini, we can see that it shows up in my title. It shows up in my description right here.

[02:53] If we scroll down and come under Show More, we are also going to see that it shows multiple times in my tags right here. In fact, it shows more than five times in my tags. And you need to make sure that is set up That going to be step one of your metadata being correct Ideally too the actual file that you upload to YouTube should contain that keyword in the name of the file if you want to help this out even more

[03:18] In addition to that, if we scroll down a little bit, we are going to see category right here. You need to make sure that this category is correct. Now, this is an educational video about Google Gemini, which is why I put education. If you aren't uploading about education, don't put education.

[03:33] Put whatever it is that you're uploading about. If you're uploading about Minecraft, put gaming. If you're uploading about Drake's new album, put music. If you're posting about what somebody in politics did, post news and politics. You want to make sure that that is correct.

[03:46] Now, in addition to that, you also need to make sure that when you come into the subtitles right here, that this has the correct keywords and the correct spellings. You need to make sure that you are checking this because Google, more importantly YouTube, is going to be looking at your subtitles, the name of your file, your title, your transcript of your video, what you're actually saying, your tags, and your description.

[04:09] Those six things in order to determine what the metadata is on your posts and who gets shown your content. So if you're messing your metadata up, your content is getting shown to the wrong people. That's why your videos are getting shadow banned.

[04:22] It might not actually be the video itself, but this type of stuff. Now, change number three, and this one is incredibly important and totally underrated, is you need to stop just posting random stuff on YouTube, and instead, you need to begin using AI to help you recreate what is going viral.

[04:38] And I'm not talking about making AI flop. I'm actually talking about something totally different. It's a new workflow that's going to allow you to create viral shorts way faster without any risk of YouTube actually saying,

[04:50] Hey, that's AI-generated content. So the way that you're going to do this is using ContentBuddy.ai because if you come under YouTube Shorts right here, Content Creation, you're going to see this AI Video Remixer tool. This is absolutely insane.

[05:03] What this is going to allow you to do is find a video in your niche that's gone viral. For example, let's say this one right here, Best Investment Watch. If we wanted to recreate this video, we could literally just come over here, copy the link to this video, come over into this tool, put this in here, click on Recreate.

[05:18] And this is going to give us everything that we need to recreate that viral video. It's going to give us the titles. It's going to give us the script. Look at this. It gives us an optimized script right here based on the actual video and the length of the video.

[05:31] It gives us title suggestions that are better than the original title. In addition to that, it gives us new hooks that we can put on the screen. It also gives us an optimized description and optimized tags. And guess what? Every single one of these is going to be optimized for you to maximize the reach that you're getting on YouTube.

[05:50] In addition to that, another really powerful way for you to use this is actually to come over to your most popular videos and recreate them. So we can see right here that I've had many videos get millions of views. Let's say I wanted to make a new one on this one.

[06:03] I'm going to copy the link address. I'm going to come over here. I'm going to put this in here. And then once again this is going to write me a new script an updated title new tags that I can use new description new hook And this makes it incredibly easy for me to actually go through and create tons of new content with things that are actually going to work and things that are actually going to help me grow faster

[06:25] And essentially what this is doing is analyzing the video that we gave it and then creating a better version of it. But this isn't going to be the type of thing that's going to be considered AI slot by YouTube because you're not just copying something,

[06:37] you're actually making a better version of it, and you're using AI to help you create content faster and create better content instead of just relying on AI to pump out a bunch of content that nobody actually wants to watch.

[06:51] And the best part about content, buddy, is if you go to the pin comment below, you can get started with it today for free. They're offering a seven-day free trial because their tool is so powerful, they know that it can help you go viral on YouTube. So what are you waiting for? Go to the pin comment below and check it out today.

[07:05] Change number four is you need to make sure that you're creating at least 30 to 40% of reels that are trying to rank for a search on YouTube Shorts. This is one of the most underrated types of content that you could be posting on YouTube right now.

[07:17] In fact, it's helped me go viral time after time after time, and I have never had a video flatline or a video get shadow banned that was trying to rank for a search, so I would strongly suggest that you implement this.

[07:30] So if we actually look at all of my most viral videos right here, the majority of these rank for search. This one about YouTube settings. This one about monetizing YouTube. This one about changing thumbnails, turning on comments.

[07:42] This one right here about how to turn off shorts. This one right here about if you're posting too much, how much YouTube pays, changing settings. What you're going to notice is that the majority of them rank for search. Because look, when somebody comes over here and they type in something like how to turn on comments on YouTube,

[07:58] what you are going to notice is that you get shown some long form content but more importantly you get shown shorts and my short is one of the most viewed ones under here and this is one of the most underrated things that you could possibly do right now because guess what doesn't matter what niche

[08:12] you're in you could be in the fishing niche for example if we come over here how to catch I'm going to do trout because I'm in Montana right now we're going to find the same thing there are some long form videos but then more importantly there are a bunch of shorts here and look at this 1.3

[08:27] million, 1 million, 1.4, 1 million, 1 million. And if we scroll up, what you're going to notice is the long form, 200,000, 40,000, 600,000, 900,000. There are way more shorts going viral

[08:41] on this topic. And guess what? If we look up something like how to get big biceps, completely different niche, we're going to find the same thing. We've got some long form content, but then we've got these shorts that are crushing it way more because viewers on YouTube right now

[08:57] want to watch shorts, and they are finding shorts more helpful when they're searching on something, and guess what? This is me looking for something on a computer. If I looked on a TV, or I looked on a phone, or an iPad, guess what? I'd actually get shown even more shorts, and this is exactly

[09:14] what your audience is seeing So when your audience does searches for things 24 and your videos aren showing up this is something that is actually hurting you on YouTube instead of helping you And ideally 30 to 40 of your content should be how you are going to actually get videos to rank for search

[09:33] And the number one way to do that is just to create a bunch of how-to videos related to whatever niche that you're in. If you're confused on exactly what people might be searching for, simply come over to ChatGPT and say something like,

[09:45] I am in the how to grow on YouTube niche. Give me how to related videos my audience is searching for. This will actually go through and give you a list of different videos

[09:58] that would be really good to make and then just start to crush these out. And then that last thing you need to make sure that you do is you need to make sure that you're hitting the right analytics. I'm going to walk you through exactly what that is, but like I shared with you in the beginning of this video,

[10:10] this is the most important part of the video. If you mess this part up, guaranteed your videos aren't going to get reach, and it's going to feel like YouTube shadowbanning your stuff. Okay, so when it comes to the actual analytics you need to care about, there's only two things.

[10:23] I'm going to show you my top two most viewed shorts on this channel and prove this to you. When you come over here, this video has gotten 78,000 views. As we notice here, 93% of that traffic coming from search. So this video, pretty soon, is going to reach 100,000 views.

[10:36] And as a result, if we come down here, we're going to see the state to watch is just below 75%. You need to make sure this is over 75%. The only reason that this is below it is simply just because this video has gotten so many views.

[10:50] So over time, it will go down a little bit. But ideally, this is over 75%. Your average view duration needs to match or be greater than the length of your video, which you are going to see right here.

[11:02] If neither of those two things are true, then this means something. It means, one, your hook was messed up, two, your topic was messed up, three, your video just wasn't good enough to get people to actually re-watch. And if we notice here, at the 0% mark, we're at 157%.

[11:16] What does that mean? That almost every other person actually watches this video twice, and it loops. If we come back over here, same thing, Claude's new Opus 4.6 model, 60,000 views, majority of views coming from YouTube Shorts.

[11:30] If we come down here, majority of views coming from YouTube Shorts. If we come down here, we're going to see stayed to watch 82%. Again, over 75%. Average view duration, 38 seconds on a 40-second video.

[11:43] We come over here, same exact thing, 147%. So just below every other person is watching the video. Again, those are the exact metrics that you need to make sure you are hitting every time that you post on YouTube.

[11:56] If you do not hit these metrics, it's going to be the reason that you look like you are shadow banned. It's not that you are shadow banned. it's simply that your metadata is messed up, you're not hitting the right analytics, you're just creating random videos

[12:09] instead of recreating what's gone viral, and you're using AI the wrong way instead of the right way to help you actually create better content, spend less time doing it, and to grow faster on YouTube. Now, if you enjoyed this video

[12:21] and you want to learn exactly how the YouTube Shorts algorithm works right now so you can maximize your reach, I would strongly suggest you check out this video right here. They're walking through exactly how that works. That's how it goes for us, and I'll see you over there.