Thanks for reporting this and the SMX event in general. A shame I could not make it.

Flight Centre’s response is also very helpful for clarifying this grey area.

Ash

EDITOR: No problems Ash

Do you work at Sensis? because that’s what your IP address says.

Flight Centre has developed an online brochure system that converts brochure pages into javascript which allows people to quickly and easily view travel information. The online catalogue pages are images, so the content in those pages, while discernible to the human eye, cannot be indexed by search engine spiders and hence this large volume of travel information may never be accessed by the public. Our intent is purely to improve the visual experience and not to deceive the search engines.

In the development of this solution for our customers, our technology partners conducted research to understand how content from our brochures could be searched by people researching travel. We sought a second opinion from Google about how to index the content from the brochures to allow our customers access to this information. We showed our solution to a Google CSE. He reviewed our site maps and robots.txt and replied in writing that “everything looks ok”.

It is clear that our intent is not to show content to spiders that differs from the content in the pages and therefore should not be regarded as blackhat cloaking. Further, Flight Centre did not receive any extra benefit in natural rankings from providing content in this format. The content that was visible to Google’s spiders is an identical replica to what is shown in the customer friendly brochure viewer so no unfair advantage was gained nor sought.

We support Google’s stance on blackhat cloaking. However, we need to further understand how their universal mandate to outlaw the solution to indexing images can be modified to account for situations such as ours where our intention is purely to provide the best possible user experience. We are working on an alternative solution and would also welcome the opportunity to work with Google to document a solution on how to index images rather Google adopting the stance “we can only educate on SEO, we cannot tell you what to do ”.

EDITOR: Thanks for your reply Colin, as I said in my article I am quite happy for you to have right of reply to explain why your system works the way it does

Next year, I’m all about it. And to those Flight Centre guys, in the immortal words of Nelson: HA-Ha!

Good to see Google move on the case so quickly but I will say I do feel sorry for Flight Centre, I’m more than willing to believe this was done in complete ignorance by someone in IT with only a little SEO knowledge or was being done by a shady agency who thought they could get away with it.

One expects that someone is on the recieving end of some pretty serious internal emails today.