14 DAY TRIAL // In the past, when the super search engine Google was only a kid, the Internet searching tools provided extremely disappointing results as many of them were dead, expired or already removed. Since Google became the most powerful search engine on the web, things evolved and most of the results displayed on the SERP are now available and waiting for your click. But it seems like Google is now assaulted by an army of dead links coming from inside the company. If you still don't get it, I'm referring to YouTube, the online video sharing service powered by Google which seems to be a technology which affects the quality of the Google SERP. Andrew Girdwood wrote on his blog that he discovered several dead results published by Google's search engine.
According to his blog post, the dead links are provided by YouTube which removed certain videos from the page due to the copyright complaints or other requirements received by the video sharing service. This matter is quite obvious because Google needs time to remove the deleted YouTube listings from its results.
"What happens if YouTube deletes the video? Do you think Google would adjust the SERPs or just leave the embedded video there? The big black square? That's what you get when you try and watch one of the videos. That black square persists for nearly 10 seconds (in tests so far) before the "this video has been removed" message appears over a still from the video," the blogger wrote in the post.
Google can't be blamed for the dead links returned to the users because the Googlebot automatically recrawls the websites at a certain period of time and, if YouTube removes a link just after the bot left the website, the result remains unavailable until it comes back.