Definitely an interesting topic... http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/001639.html Google got busted for cloaking their own pages to manipulate rankings in their own search engine.
Quoting MR. Brett Tabke So, it was just an innocent mistake... sure, no one at Google would ever do anything bad... Pathetic...
Yeah, fryman, and you can bet your bottom dollar, that if you or I made such an "innocent mistake", it wouldn't prevent Google from slapping us up one side of the head and down the other. For another take on this issue, as well as other Google oopsies, check out http://news.stepforth.com/blog/2005/03/goofy-goings-on-at-google.php
And why couldnt google have just built these pages ? wouldn't that have been alot easier... next they'll be hunting for backlinks
Oh, boy, I am having so much fun seeing how the people at WMW are posting all kind of BS to justify this as a simple error made by a rookie programmer. I can only imagine home many "right hands" are over there at the Googleplex pushing their own sites to a #1 ranking... heck, if no one will notice, who cares?
That is interesting..how people think when google did this deliberately or not...anyway now I can't find in in Google results.
With all this bad news about google, the auto links aswell i think people might start moving over to msn.
Or they (re)spider their own index so they show in the SERPs plus 302 hijack Amazon, eBay and M$' network and add Co-op to all their pages so they can get some links
Not to mention adding buckets of hidden text to the home page. Honestly when is the last time you checked all that white space?
I don't know if this will last for long, as Google may remove it. But Google cloaks: https://adwords.google.co.uk/support/bin/answer.py?answer=9653&topic=65 Take a look at this page in a normal browser. You will see that the title is: "Google AdWords Support: Why do traffic estimates for my Ad Group differ from those given by the standalone tool?" That's reasonable. Now take a look at the same page using Firefox's browser pretending to be Googlebot (using the appropriate extension). Suddenly, the title is stuffed with keywords: "traffic estimator, traffic estimates, traffic tool, estimate traffic" There are multiple pages in Google like this.
checking http://www.google.com document length to google bot = 2460 [Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)] document length to browser = 3408 [Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT 5.1)] If the document length for each user-agent type is different, then that is a good indication that the page is checking for the user-agent and displaying different content. Cloaking does not always mean is site is trying to trick a search engine robot, sites may cloak their site for different browsers, depending on what technologies they support http://www.spidercode.com/content/view/54/47/?phpshop=5c9920343d963b1ec98a7807940b2eef