Yahoo! Caught Cloaking
Cloaking is the act of sending different data to search engine crawlers than to users of a page. You can usually see cloaking in action on shady sites that have a bunch of keywords at the bottom of a page that are the same color as the background text. In the end, those keywords aren’t part of actual content, but designed to inflate search engine stats. Cloaking in the age of Google also involves linking those keywords to increase Page Rank, the stats by which a page moves up or down in Google.
Cloaking is something that search engines frown upon and even ban you for. Yahoo, according to a blog, has actually been caught cloaking.
Below is what you, as a user see (click to embiggen):
And here, below, is what a search engine crawler sees (click to embiggen):
He also points out four ways in which Yahoo! is violating its own guidelines for sites:
# Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking
# The use of text that is hidden from the user
# Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees
# Pages built primarily for the search engines
Not Good, Yahoo!. Not good at all.
via Threadwatch
May 22nd, 2007 at 9:21 am
Yahoo! fixed it.
http://autos.yahoo.com/used-cars/used-cars-forsale.html
They decided to be “open” and “honest”…
Heh.
May 22nd, 2007 at 11:57 am
I dunno, that doesn’t make any sense. Not that I don’t believe you, I do, but why in the world would Yahoo, a powerful internet presence in almost everything pull something like this. They already have traffic and whatnot, people use their services religiously, so why do something like this?
May 22nd, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Dave,
It isn’t a matter of believing or not believing. I have the screen shots to prove that it was happening.
The page they have up right now is the same keyword stuffed page that they were only showing to the bots and not the users.
They weren’t following their own guidelines.
May 22nd, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Search engine placement?
Specifically Google.
Truth is, Yahoo! knows people don’t use its search the way they use Google’s. Obviously they’re not trying to game themselves, but it’s pretty obvious they are trying to game other search engines.