Cloaking is against Google's webmaster guidelines, it is when you show Google one thing and the user a different thing.
Daily Motion is cloaking specifically for Google and the reason is not that clear. Why would a huge video site be playing games like this?
A Google Webmaster Help thread has one user upset Google is showing a video in their search results after the video was removed from Daily Motion.
The issue is, Daily Motion is telling Google the video is actually there.
John Mueller of Google said that Daily Motion is cloaking and what they are doing is simply not right towards the users and their guidelines. John wrote:
It seems a bit odd of Dailymotion to say that it's up to us when they are specifically cloaking the content in a way that Googlebot sees it, and other users don't. Checking your URL with a Googlebot user-agent (http://goo.gl/yjX39) shows that they are showing the full content, while checking the URL with a normal browser ( http://goo.gl/LVV26 ) shows the proper removal code. To me, this seems like they are explicitly wanting to have it shown in Google's search results.I'm happy to try to contact them about this and to see if the removals team is able to do something here regardless.
It is pretty amazing that Daily Motion is showing all those old video details here. Are they doing it on purpose or was this some sort of bug?
Finally, will Google take action?
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
Update: Dailymotion sent me a technical explanation for what happened:
According to our infrastructure engineers, it was "a caching proxy assigned to crawling robots that was serving stale entries because of a configuration bug". We actually serve content via specific proxies to robots, in order for this to not impact the user experience. The volume of search engines robots queries to our website is quite important : for Google, according to GWT, roughly 20 million pages crawled each day, representing more than 300,000,000 kilobytes.
