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."

Comments

Questionable?

[DeadSea]

As I posted in the last story about this, it was very easy to confirm that the pages were serving up different content to googlebot than they were serving up to everybody else. I opened up a command prompt and used telnet to download the page as if I were googlebot and without a user agent string:

telnet adwords.google.co.uk 80
GET /support/bin/answer.py?answer=9653&topic=65 HTTP/1.0
host: adwords.google.co.uk
User-Agent: Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)

...

<ti tle>
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?
</title>
...

And without googlebot:

telnet adwords.google.co.uk 80
GET /support/bin/answer.py?answer=9653&topic=65 HTTP/1.0
host: adwords.google.co.uk

...

<title>
Google AdWords Support: Why do traffic estimates for my Ad Group differ from those given by the standalone tool?
</title>
...

Re:Questionable?

[DeadSea]

I just tried this again today, and it appears that google adsense has fixed. They are returning the same content to googlebot as their are returning to all other user agents.

Re:I still don't get it

[NetNifty]

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.

Re:Problem with Search Appliance

[_Sharp'r_]

The source is a Google employee with corporate permission to occasionally speak outside the plex on issues.

See his comments at Webmaster World.

Didn't mean to post as AC

[isometrick]

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.

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 ... 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?

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.

Re:Nice to see...

[Syre]

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.