Sphinn - A Question for Google about Ethical SEO

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Sphinn It!

Went Hot: October 4, 2007 - 3:15 pm
Posted By: NeO 372 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.beanstalk-inc.com)
Category: Google SEO

Daryl Quenet from Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, wants your feedback on just what you would consider cloaking based on a deceptive site he found in the SERPs.

8 Comments

Who Desphunn This (0)

Comments

from Isis 372 days ago #

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Hi Daryl, I have only read about cloaking. I know that many people that are making a sizable amount of money do indeed engage in some type of cloaking.

from seofactor 372 days ago #

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I would consider this cloaking. At least of the spammy sort. We have been using this method for what can be considered "optimizing" our Flash pages. However, we would only place content in the JS that is directly visible in the Flash. You're a search engine? You see content. You're a human visitor? You see the exact same content, just prettier.

from qwerty 372 days ago #

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It doesn't really matter what method they're using to accomplish this. The proper thing to serve a search engine spider if your site is in flash is the HTML equivalent of the content in the flash. That's not what they're doing here. Instead, they've got lots of text that they figure is what the search engine wants, even though they're not showing it to people.

All they need to do in order to make this honest is to offer the user access to either a flash or an HTML version of the site. The HTML version could contain the content they're currently hiding from everyone but the spiders.

from drmadcow 372 days ago #

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Agreed. Another even simpler thing would be to put the content under the flash movie. Then it wouldn't be cloaking.

from Jill 372 days ago #

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We are outing spam sites on Sphinn now?

from Harith 371 days ago #

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Jill

"We are outing spam sites on Sphinn now?"

Did you mean "We are filing now spam reports to google in public" :-)

from mpilatow 371 days ago #

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Apparently so Jill.

from wdeloach 371 days ago #

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In the article it was proposed that just by looking at the site, there was no valid reason for it to rank for the phrase. To me that is misleading. All of the terms of the phrase were visible on the page even if not together as one phrase. My company info page ranks well for city (in company address) + a brand name that is only mentioned in reference to a return policy on that page.

I question the intentions of the post. It's not hard to say that what is done on the site is not best-practice (calling it by cloaking or any other name). However, my question is was the outing really a way to just please the prospective client that is a competitor to the site? Does that not raise it's own ethical questions?

This is a time I'd like to be able to vote down a post.