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Is serving Googlebot a transcript in place of a video considered to be cloaking?

Is serving Googlebot a transcript in place of a video considered to be cloaking? - answered by Matt Cutts

Matt's answer:

We have an interesting question from Jeremy in Chicago. Jeremy asks: Hi Matt. Is serving a word-for-word text transcript in place of a video to Googlebot considered a negative form of cloaking which could result in a penalty? So I’ll talk specifically about the web search rankings. I think Google News might say, OK, if it’s audio and it’s the exact, same transcript, then maybe it’s OK. But I can talk about the web search rankings. That would be considered cloaking, and I would not recommend doing it. Instead, do something that’s good for users and for Googlebot by showing the video, and show the transcript as well. There’s no reason not to give the transcript so people who have trouble with the video would be able to see what the content is. And then also, you’ve got the video for the people who want to watch it and take the time. So rather than saying, let’s swap out the video and have the transcript, I would say, if possible, have both. The one thing I would not do for Google’s web search rankings is to show different content to Google than to users. So it would be safe to show the video, it would be safe to show the transcript, it would be safe to show both, but it wouldn’t be safe to show the video to users and just the transcript to Googlebot. I hope that makes sense.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: