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>
...