YouTube is Cloaking, So why can’t I?
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Ok. So this is an entry I had to do some real due diligence for to make sure my ducks are in a row. But I’m pretty sure I have this solid. YouTube is cloaking.
What is YouTube Cloaking?
Youtube cloaks any video that gets flagged as having inappropriate content. And this is a LOT of youtube. A shadow youtube almost. There are videos of people removing a lot of clothes, somewhat sexually themed breast exams, and oh yeah. Riot videos. (Yes, I discovered this looking for the LA riot videos, not the naughty ones).
How is it cloaking?
Try and go to the video while not logged into youtube, and you are confronted with a screen that says you have to login and be 18+ to see the content.
Now, if you search for site:youtube.com la riots it appears that there is no cached version available for the first result. However, searching for cache:www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0hQuf0287g will show that in reality, there is a cached version. A cached version with all the content, and all the links available! (The video doesn’t play).
Still, this enables youtube to show and rank for a HUGE amount of searches. If they weren’t cloaking, the pages would all look the same, and wouldn’t even have the video name in the title of the page.
Additionally, it distributes their link juice to all related videos, user profiles, and more. Juice that would not be going much of anywhere otherwise.
And before someone goes mentions it, no this isn’t just a case of the cache being taken before a major change, and where it will be remedied with time. I held off writing this for a week or so so I could actually wait until the cache date updated (see images below)
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May 16th Cache
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May 6th Cache
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| And Both Times, I was greeted with this real version…
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Possible Implications if This is Ok - This has some pretty expansive implications that could prove interesting.
- The Adult Industry - So if “saving the children” is an ok reason in Google’s eyes for cloaking, are the larger adult sites allowed to show a super optimized home page to the search engines? After all, that page normally has the most link juice flowing to it, and right now is a waste due to government regulations (it’s supposed to be an 18 year or older check, and hence is lacking in good keywords and tags)
- Message Boards/Information Services - YouTube cloaking prohibits someone from watching a video unless they’re verified as being over 18, and signed up for the service…so are messageboards allow to do the same? What about information services like lexisnexis that have hundreds of thousands of hidden pages? Or maybe having to pay for registration is where google is where Google draws the line.
- Unfair Trade Practices Anyone? - I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me that the foundation of most monopoly/anti-trust cases are using an existing business to give yourself an unfair advantage over your competitors. Considering sites like dailymotion could NEVER get away with this, you really have to wonder…
From Wikipedia, one of the basic guidelines used by the european union to determine if a business is engaging in unfair business practices:
“abusive behaviour by a firm dominating a market, or anti-competitive practices that tend to lead to such a dominant position. Practices controlled in this way may include predatory pricing, tying, price gouging, refusal to deal and many others.”
I do believe cloaking your own search engine without fear of a ban is “anti-competitive practice that tends to lead to a dominant position”
-XMCP
May 16th, 2008 at 11:04 am
Wow!! Great post. I’ve seen these warnings before but I never really gave it much thought.
I guess the moral of the story is black hat is okay if you get acquired by the right company.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Nice find XMCP
Breaking stuff!
May 16th, 2008 at 11:13 am
I was also very skeptical of googles version of wikipedia, google knol. In that they’ll could basically just auto rank themselves if they so deem to, and were practicing things like above already.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:17 am
I am *shocked* there is gambling going on in this club!
I have this image of some guy at google crossing one thing off one of the 1,001 “dirty tricks” or “reserved for Google” list.
-OT
May 16th, 2008 at 11:32 am
Good catch…
But I dont really see this as anything that hasent been done before (unless I’m missing something here).
The New York Times did this years ago with full Google and Yahoo blessings:
I think that their argument will be that even if you click on another video in the cache, you are confronted with the verification screen, and like you said, the video never plays (although screen shots abound!) *makes mental note for future sites*
I find other sites doing this as well, maybe it just comes down to the typical bias of; if your big enough, you can get away with a lot?
None-the-less, great find - good read!
May 16th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
I’d say this is an admission to an allowable form of cloaking, and if implemented the same way YouTube has done should keep you clear of a GSlap. It makes sense to age verify when the content requires it.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Google often gives their blessings to bigger content networks to cloak. I know AOL Canada got that privilege, because a colleague who worked there told me so. Is it fair - Umm…No! Can we do anything about it? Umm..No… *Sigh*
May 16th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Wait for Google’s official explanation: “This is a mistake. Thank you for catching it.” That was their explanation when they were caught do-following paid links on Google Video.
May 16th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
@Musashi: It’s one thing when Google just turns a blind eye to big companies (like them turning a blind eye to Techcrunch selling links that pass link juice for years and years). It wasn’t until recently that Techcrunch finally went no follow on those. Always another when they do the “offending” action themselves. They really just a typical parent. Do as I say, not as I do.
May 16th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
It would be nice to have a list of sites google allows cloaking to throw back in their face. This double standard is an unfair business practice.
May 16th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
I think this is one of the Legal ways of cloaking.
May 16th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
LOL submit it to Google Spam Report!
May 16th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Golden rule example. Wonder if this will be affecting their pagerank?
May 17th, 2008 at 1:41 am
Agree, it depends on how big you are and how publicly you get found out.
Like Flight Centre getting busted at SMX Sydney. They apparently had the OK from Google but you’ll see now all their cloaking is gone.
If only they were owned by the big G…
May 17th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
[…] manieren hoe je het legaal kan gebruiken. Youtube is daar een goed voorbeeld ervan, opgemerkt door XMCP, die een heel ander kijk heeft hierop dan ik. Youtube (een dochteronderneming van G) laat namelijk […]
May 18th, 2008 at 6:19 am
hey XMCP,
I just found your site on Google and wanted to say I love your articles! You sure do have great knowledge about SEO and Internet Marketing. I added your RSS to my Reader and Twittered your Google cloaking Youtube Post. Keep up the great work!
Xarj
May 18th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
“I think this is one of the Legal ways of cloaking.”
Can you cut the crap about Google making the law? Google is a company, not the government!
May 18th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
of course, youtube can always manipulate their results. this is usually used for ulterior motives. Personally, i dont mind at all as long as it has the purpose of protecting kids from watching mature content IMO.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:24 am
Well, that brings up an interesting point. Why would Google need to cloak to rank higher. If they want Youtube to rank higher they can just manually move the pages up. They’ve already integrated it into Google’s API, so it already has an unfair advantage. They also integrated metacafe into their API, but it never coincidentally seems to rank as high as youtube.
May 19th, 2008 at 9:47 am
@ gab goldenberg: with that i don’t mean that google is making the laws or that they’re a goverment, we both know that there are some ways of using “cloak” which can be considered unethical, im just saying that this u could consider ‘ethical cloaking’, like when u’d have a forum, but dont want visitors to just read everything , they would have to register first. in that case ur site wont get indexed, becuase the spiders would have to register, but what if u could allow the spiders to index everything? i think its the same concept in this case.
May 19th, 2008 at 10:03 am
Good someone made a bit of noise about this. Great call, great post.
May 20th, 2008 at 1:04 am
The Experts Exchange douchebags do this too. If you google a tech question, often they’re in the top 10 serps. However when you visit the page, the answers are “grayed out” until you pay for a membership.
IMO they should be banned from google. They’ve done it for years w/o a problem. Cloaking works, just have to do it right.
May 20th, 2008 at 3:57 am
[…] An
May 20th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
@Nick: Anytime you visit Experts Exchange for an answer to your question, just scroll all the way toward the bottom, where the answers are displayed in plain text (no membership required). You might also try the cached version of the page.
May 24th, 2008 at 5:09 am
I’ts totally Unfair and unethical to do such a thing. hope you all will agree on this.
Cheers.
May 24th, 2008 at 5:14 am
XMCP:) You have done a great job,I think we all have to appriciate it.
Keep on rolling!!
May 27th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
[…] in with Google over hoax linkbait, Google really getting to grips with forms, big sites that are cloaking and even geo-hashing. It’s like a trap for me to fall into, seeing all these opinions flying […]
May 29th, 2008 at 12:05 am
Very nice find, you are totally right.
May 29th, 2008 at 1:03 am
Nice find - it doesn’t surprise me at all. I see national websites practicing deceptive and low quality things all the time yet they outrank everyone. The Googler is pretty bad at doing what they claim they do.
May 29th, 2008 at 8:13 am
great discovery …. i think google is evil they make their site rank in the top 10 of the SERPs and doing cloaking them self ..
what a shame …
June 4th, 2008 at 7:42 am
[…] sui contenuti di Youtube? Peccato che non lo faccia anche su tutti i miei siti… fonte: slightlyshadyseo.com […]
June 4th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
I understand your explanation of why they would do this for link juice, but does someone as big and established as You Tube need that. Can’t it get enough from live links?
June 6th, 2008 at 7:05 am
@Wii Boy: It can, but youtube..err..has some titties as well. So in order to keep those videos live, in the US they’d need to have an 18 or older check. Which would show as dupe content for each video, or not get indexed. This way, they bypass it and show the proper title/comments while still showing the age check page. This is a tactic not allowed for adult sites by the way.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Is this method still alive?
July 2nd, 2008 at 7:30 am
I can understand why YouTube would do this. At least their cloaked content is available to most people, and you don’t have to pay to reach it. However… One of the biggest irritations to me is when I’m using Google to research something and I get multiple, high-ranking results from jstor.org and every one of them is cloaked and cashing is disabled. It makes me wish there were a user preference to automatically blacklist all results from jstor and other such irritating sites.
November 12th, 2008 at 1:46 am
Very good finding and information to share. Thinking the way I may cloak legally.