Google is cloaking Schema.org markup

Yes, Google is cloaking Schema.org markup on its product Youtube ! For those who don’t know what is cloaking : It is about serving different contents depending on the User-agent (or IP) a the client who asked the load the website. You can check the Google’s definition of cloaking here. On SEO this technique may be perceived as black hat and not permitted by search engines guidelines (sometimes not if it make users life easier for UX reasons …etc).

Youtube stopped serving Schema Structured data for users

This morning Jan spotted on Schema.org mailing list that Youtube stopped serving Schema.org markup to users and continue to do it for Google only.

So if we take a Youtube URL and test it with Google Structured Data Testing Tool we will see that Schema code is being served

I also checked it with Fetch and render tool

Strange no ? Dan Brickley from Google said that he informed his colleagues working on Youtube and they are investigating.

So why Youtube is doing that ? I don’t think that is desired by Google because it is a little paradoxical with its will to evangelise Schema and urging webmasters to implement it. So what’s the goal to hide Schema markup for users ? May be it is a bug.