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In an unexpected twist to the end of Day 2 at SMX Sydney Rand Fishkin and Danny Sullivan exposed a possible case of blackhat cloaking by Flightcentre.com.au
Searchengineland.com’s Danny Sullivan & Rand Fishkin from Seomoz discovering possible blackhat cloaking on Flightcentre.com.au
Page on Flightcentre.com.au viewed with different user agents
While doing an SEO review for another tourism website, Rand and Danny discovered that this page at the Flight Centre website was possibly breaking Google’s anti-cloaking rules by displaying different content depending on whether the user-agent is a web browser like “Firefox” or a search engine like “Googlebot 2.1”
“Cloaking is the practice of presenting a version of a web page to search engines that is different from the version presented to users, with the intention of deceiving the search engines and affecting the page’s ranking in the search index” – source: Google Adwords Help Center
“Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index” – source: Google Webmaster Help Center
“More generally, if someone is trying to manipulate Google by deceptive cloaking, it means that a webserver is returning different content to Googlebot than to users” – source: Google Webmaster Help Center
For more information about black hats and cloaking visit these excellent articles at Searchengineland.com:
- Search Illustrated: Black Hat Cloaking Explained
- Black-Hat SEOs Are Worthless, Shady Criminals
- Good Cloaking, Evil Cloaking & Detection
- YADAC: Yet Another Debate About Cloaking Happens Again
- Google’s Matt Cutts On Cloaking & Search Snippets
My question to you is this merely a case of “graceful depredation” so that search engines can “see” text that human visitors can read from the image on the page or is Flightcentre.com.au blackhat cloaking in blatant breach of Google rules?
EDIT: Flight Centre has written a right of reply at Comment #8
PS I will post a SMX Sydney Day 2 recap within 24 hours to followup on Day One Recap – SMX Sydney SEO SEM Conference 2008
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