Google: caught cloaking?
by brian_turner
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According to the Threadwatch article Google Caught Cloaking and Keyword Stuffing?, the search engine company has been caught red-handed using a technique the company publicly condemns.
“Cloaking” is a technique used to provide different pages to search engine spiders and human users. This means that adept users can produce pages that are stuffed full of keywords and coding for rankings purposes, that would otherwise make the page unreadable for human visitors.
Google has particularly proscribed against the practice, as provided in its Webmaster Guidelines on cloaking:
The term “cloaking” is used to describe a website that returns altered webpages to search engines crawling the site. In other words, the webserver is programmed to return different content to Google than it returns to regular users, usually in an attempt to distort search engine rankings. This can mislead users about what they’ll find when they click on a search result. To preserve the accuracy and quality of our search results, Google may permanently ban from our index any sites or site authors that engage in cloaking to distort their search rankings.
In other words, Google threatens to entirely remove a site from Google’s index if found cloaking. As up to 70% of total search traffic is supplied by Google results, either directly through Google search engines, or partner providers such as AOL, then this can have a terrible impact on any businesses that earn revenues from surfers finding their products or surfers through natural search results.
However, Google has changed some of its pages on AdWords so that human users will see normal page titles, but a search engine robot will see a string of keywords instead.
This can be clearly seen in the human-user version, and the search engine spider version.
The title of the page (at the very top of the browser window) is as follows:
Human users:
Google AdWords Support: Why do traffic estimates for my Ad Group differ from those given by the standalone tool?
Search engines:
traffic estimator, traffic estimates, traffic tool, estimate traffic Google AdWords Support: Why do traffic estimates for my Ad Group differ from those given by the standalone tool?
This suggests that Google is using cloaking to present pages with different page titles for ranking purposes - which the company has already expressly forbidden.
What is more, the company has also performed this in multiple languages, as can be seen here: Google cloaking in multiple languages.
If this accusation is sustained, then it could be a major blow to the company and its reputation, and be seen as an act of utmost hypocrisy. It could also be damaging in the longer term in its fight against so-called “dirty tricks” methods if the same search engine that condemns these methods is also believed to be practising them.
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