Banned Yahoo!? The Cloaking Issue Aftermath
Cloaking- a technique used by “black hat SEO’s” to fool a search engine into giving them a higher ranking by delivering search engine friendly content which is different from what actual users see in their browsers. This practice though sometimes effective is shun by many website developers for it usually results to being penalized or even banned in the major search engines.
If the search engines are the one seeing to it that this deceptive practice is not used by site owners, one comes to the question on wether sites like Google, Yahoo! or MSN can keep themselves from using it. Will they apply the same rules that they expect everyone to follow, to themselves?
This is the question on everybody’s mind after Yahoo! was discovered to have been using cloaking on their autos site. Agerhart.com provided screenshots of what looked like a page filled with the key word “used cars” plus another screenshot of the same page without the key word. Yahoo! immediately corrected the problem and even admitted the practice. Since it is quite unlikely for them to ban themselves, people wonder whether other engines like Google or MSN will penalize their autos section.
Personally, what made me wonder were the factors that could have pushed a billion dollar company like theirs to engage in a practice they themselves warn websites from doing. A little search made me discover that for the keyword “used cars” http://autos.yahoo.com/ is listed on the 28th for google, 25th on MSN and is not listed on their own engine. That surprised me. A similar search on Myriadsearch.com did not show any listing on Yahoo!. I had to check further and was able to see a sub page on the 15th position. And I almost thought retribution was being done by Yahoo!. As for their ranking, is that reason enough to risk your trusted brand? Is Yahoo! really fighting hard to retain the market share they are currently losing for this keyword/product.
I for one do not have the answers. Unlike Yahoo! I think I will stay with accepted and natural ways of getting indexed and ranked well. I just cannot and will not risk it.
