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Google Punishes Self for Cloaking

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the slap-their-own-wrists dept.

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."

8 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. Ah. by Robotron23 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Interesting...A company as huge as Google trying to maintain its squeeky clean company reputation (and hence respect of us nerds) through such meticulous work and attention to its userbase.

    Maybe Google's return to its old informal self is on the cards? :)

  2. At Least They Didn't Hardcode The Results Page by filmmaker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A lot of search engines would have just hardcoded their own result at or near the number one spot. Not trying to be a Google fanboy, but you gotta give them credit for at least cheating the hard way.

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    I Want To Believe
  3. Microsoft by Fade_to_Blah · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If Microsoft pulled this same stunt with their new search engine this entire crowd (or most) would be jumping all over them for being evil.

    Google gets the Slashdot "Get out of jail free" card.

  4. Deluded self-congratulatory post off t' port bow! by devphil · · Score: 5, Insightful


    2. Reads slashdot.

    'Cause, as we all know, Slashdot was the only news-reposting site to cover this story, so if Google noticed any criticisms at all, it had to come from here. A site such as, say, searchenginewatch.com, would never have mentioned it.

    --
    You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
  5. Re:Nice to see... by d34thm0nk3y · · Score: 5, Insightful

    All I am admiring is this superb bit of free PR they just pulled off. Clever bastards!

  6. Not necessarily... by Omega · · Score: 5, Insightful
    In any sufficiently large corporation, having the right hand not talk to the left hand is par for the course. I'd wager that the people who setup the adwords pages didn't know about Google's rules for cloaking or keyword stuffing -- or they thought the rules didn't apply internally. More importantly, they didn't ask anyone. It happens all the time:

    The technical or editorial teams setup the rules of the game for how their site will behave and how users will interact with the site; and then the business or sales team makes some decision without consulting the techs or editors.

    Not knowing doesn't excuse the adwords team -- they should've consulted the Google.com team before they tried to "improve their rankings on Google." I just think it's more complicated than the idea of the borg-mentality: that all actions by different parts of the company were universally sanctioned by every employee of the company.

  7. Re:Nice to see... by Syre · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If a normal site was caught using cloaking or other tricks they would be not only dropped from the Google index but would be "banned".

    ie: They would be given a PageRank of 0 and their pages would not show up in searches for 6 months to 2 years.

    If Google was really playing by the same rules they apply to everyone else, they'd ban these pages too. Instead, I bet the pages show up in a couple of days.

    If so, this is really just a PR move on their part. Nothing to do with how they really treat other sites.

  8. Re:Evil flag, once set, stays set. by Dysan2k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It occurs to me, with like 100+ million sites spidered that they might have never noticed it before? Once pointed out, they did something.

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    -What have you contributed lately?