Importance: Medium

Responding to a post stating that Google makes use of forbidden cloaking techniques itself, googleguy admits it and promises an “exemplar punishement”: banning its own pages from its own search engine for cloaking.

Cloaking, also know as stealth, is a technique used by some Web sites to deliver one page to a search engine for indexing while serving an entirely different page to everyone else.
This is clearly forbidden by Google and many other search engines guidelines and it sounds really odd (but does not really surprise me) that Google itself went against its own policy.
The funny thing, in my opinion, is the action that they are going to take against themselves, in order to fix the matter.

Googleguy says:

To be consistent with our guidelines, we’re removing these pages from our index. I think the pages are already gone from most of our data centers–a search like [site:google.com/support] didn’t return any of these pages when I checked. Once the pages are fully changed, people will have to follow the same procedure that anyone else would (email webmaster at google.com with the subject “Reinclusion request” to explain the situation)

I say it is funny because in many cases like this one, Google would ban an entire website from its search engine, but banning Google from Google i guess it wouldn’t work really nicely: Internet has already had is “big Bang” a few years ago and quite a bunch of supernovas…but the time for a blackhole still has to come…

2005/03/08