MPAA Blocked Their Own Site from Search Engines

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has recently introduced a new website that helps people find legal films and TV shows on the Internet. One should admit that this is the right step towards fighting digital piracy, but the problem is that the site is lacking an essential feature. For some reason (perhaps due to poor coding skills), the website can’t be indexed by the search engines.
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Hollywood was seen going head to head with Google in recent months, demanding the company to enforce tougher anti-piracy measures. The entertainment industry claimed that Google made it too easy for the Internet users to find illegal content. The MPAA wanted the search engine to downrank such “notorious” infringing services as The Pirate Bay from its search results or remove them entirely. Although Google has been taking additional steps to decrease the visibility of pirated content, the entertainment industries are never happy enough.

So, last week the MPAA decided to take its own steps and announced the launch of WhereToWatch.com – an online service listing the sites where films and TV shows can be watched legally. Indeed, at first glance the brand new website offers quite an impressive database of entertainment material and can be recognized as a decent service. WhereToWatch could also become an ideal platform to beat pirate websites in search results – apparently, this is exactly what the MPAA desperately wants to achieve.

Unfortunately, it can’t. It turned out that Google and other search engines simply can’t index the new site at the moment, because the MPAA’s legal platform was designed lacking even the most basic SEO principles in mind. If you don’t know what this means, we can bring an example: if the search engine visits the movie overview page, all links to individual pages are hidden by Javascript, and this is all Google can see. As a result, movie and TV show pages at WhereToWatch are invisible to the search engines, they can’t be indexed and will never appear in search results.

WhereToWatch does not directly block search engines from indexing its content, the problem is in coding of the new portal. It is known that Google already tried to explain to copyright holders what they should do to get what they want, but it seems that the MPAA didn’t consider it necessary to consult with Google this time.