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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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Nice one Neerav – you were fast to get this up.
I had a poke around when I got back from the conference and it appears that Flight Centre are definitely cloaking on that page – though only for some bot signatures.
A quick look around some of their other catalogues turns up more of the same, so this doesn’t appear to be an isolated occurrence either.
It’s cloaking. Just not very good cloaking. Old-style user agent instead of IP redirecting.
thanks Danny for linking here from SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 11, 2008 and Rand for linking from The Dangers of Cloaking Revealed at SMX Sydney
Nice work Neerav this post is ranking for “Flight centre cloaking” which is awesome. It was good to meet you at SMX and yes I will comment again in my ongoing quest for a “do follow” link from this (fast becoming) authority domain!
Hmmm,
Interestingly a search query for “Tasmania’s capital lies in the south-east of the state” now no longer returns a listing for the Flight Centre page… just the original Discover Tasmania Page … and in fact a query on site:catalogues.flightcentre.com.au returns no listings at all.. (which was not the case earlier today).
So… fast work by Adam/Google appears to have delisted the whole subdomain… Now the fun begins for Flight Center I suppose… lets see how long it takes them to sort out the issue and get reincluded….
EDITOR: thanks for the update Andy
Alas I was too busy packing down our expo stand when this occurred and didn’t even find out about it til the usual blog trawl earlier this morning.
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. 😉
Hey man, I concur with the nice effort in getting this up so quick. Cannot beLIEVE that s**t went down, especially at a show that I was unable to make.
Next year, I’m all about it. And to those Flight Centre guys, in the immortal words of Nelson: HA-Ha!
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
Hi All, I am glad to see this resolving itself. Nice posts about the show Neerav. Cheers Barry
Neerav,
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
Guilty as charged. Mentioned in my blog, which is more interesting than my IP address. 😉
Hilarious! Shame this sort of idea isn’t legitimate. I’m sure we have a few clients that would love us to try anyway! Lol.
Not a good idea with Danny and Rand patrolling the skies!