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Google Punishes Self for Cloaking
amyrick writes "eWeek is carrying a story about Google's response to March 8th's cloaking accusations. Rather than justify the shady practices as some exception to their rules, Google removed the pages from their indices, and are requiring the pages' maintainers to revise the pages and reapply for indexing. Though the existence of the cloaked pages at all is somewhat questionable, at least Google has responded with integrity and consistency."
Translation - you may now resume your baseless fanboy fawning over Google now.
Remember that Google knows quite a lot about you from what you query. They can trivially map all your Google queries back to a single person/entity/IP address. Is it good that any company knows that much information about you? And what will they do with this information? Hmmmm....
The problem was that the title of the page (ie that part in head title="...) was changing to contain the "term stuffing" text if the google bot was visiting it.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
Bah all real star trek fans know that the war bird that could fire while cloaked was given away by plasma emissions.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
The source is a Google employee with corporate permission to occasionally speak outside the plex on issues.
See his comments at Webmaster World.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
"Regime" means "form of government." A regime can be fascist, democratic, monarchist, whatever, and still be a "regime". So it is perfectly reasonable to talk about the Bush regime, the Allawi regime, the Castro regime, whatever; it has nothing to do with how repressive it is (or isn't).
Stop sarcastically saying "Bush regime." You've never experienced life in a REAL regime or seen what one does.
The definition of regime is "a system of managing government; a form of government." So what is a "REAL" regime?
(PS: There are over a hundred thousand people dead in the last three years because of the current government -- that's pretty impressive, even by tinpot dictator standards...)
I'm fairly sure that *something* was going on ... make sure that you take a look at all of the posts on the site, particularly the one that questions the "DNS" claim.
... magically around the time the article was posted (but not exactly the time) an 8 day gap appears. During this time, thousands of people were successfully visiting my site (with no DNS errors), including Yahoo's and MSN's spider (also in the directory). Maybe Google was having a localized DNS problem. Who knows?
You are right, though, I can't say with 100% confidence that they did anything underhanded.
Check out some snippets of my log [gregduffy.com] for the major spiders.
Googlebot visited every few days with gaps of at most a couple of days
My listing on Google reappeared soon after they 1) took down Google Print results from the main search page, 2) make a trivial patch to use dynamic stopwords on page numbers (doesn't fix the main problem), and 3) put Google print back in the main search results.
I dunno what happened. I don't want to put on the tinfoil hat, but it is still really weird. Again, that's the only claim I'm making: It's really weird.
I've never heard that applying to Google for anything regarding search has worked.
Discussion on the various webmaster formums and my own experience show that submitting your site to Google using their form (http://www.google.com/addurl/) is pointless. The way they add sites to their index is through links from other sites -- almost never by using their own form.
I've pointed out cases of completely obvious cloaking and spamming to them, and never received a reply. The spam sites I reported were not removed for over a year, and then most probably due to algorithm changes, not because anyone paid attention to my reports.
Has anyone ever applied for reinstatement and had Google do anything at all? Based on the above, I tend to doubt it.
Stuffing relevant words into the page the spider reads isn't in itself evil; especially as in this case it was for basically FAQ pages, not generating any income. The reason Google defines them as evil as that the "search engine optimisers" have abused this to get links for pages entirely unrelated to the words indexed, thus the number of porn and viagra pages you find linked for quite innocent searches.
Back before these scumbags started this, it was the practice to use the meta tag "keywords". But now these are ignored since the lying scumbags generated millions of pages full of various "keywords", all with viagra, porno, toner, etc ads.