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Welcome to the ineedhits Search Engine Marketing blog, where we share the latest search engine and online marketing news, releases, industry trends and great DIY tips and advice.
In a remarkable story which I first uncovered via Search Engine Land, Google has banned their own AdWords help pages from search results because of cloaking, a technique well known amongst black hat SEOs.
What is Cloaking?
According to Google’s own guidelines, Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.
Here’s a great image which explains cloaking in a little more detail:
What has Google Done?
It appears that the Google AdWords help centre has been serving up different pages to search engine spiders and users. Below is an example of the page users see vs. that seen by the Google crawler in its cache.
As a result of this, Google have banned these pages from appearing in search results. Performing a search for the exact URL currently shows no results in Google’s index. (Edit – It now appears to be re-included)
Search Engine Land asked a Google spokesperson to comment on the issue and they received the following response,
“I can confirm that some Google support pages were inadvertently showing different content to the Google crawler than to users. This error has since been fixed. We will investigate how this happened and make sure that we take appropriate action.”
It just goes to show that even the SEO police can sometimes get it wrong!
Matt is a marketing professional at ineedhits.com, an international search marketing firm. Matt's passion for online marketing began at university and has proved invaluable in steering product development and marketing initiatives at the company. Matt is a regular contributor to the ineedhits search marketing blog. Top 10 Listing! Get more targeted visitors to your site! No click fees! Find Out More Here | 1000+ Guaranteed Visitors Get thousands of guaranteed website visitors to your site in 30 days! Get Started Here |
Nice to see that when Google does things wrong they take it out on themselves…….
Someone is going to get a chop in the neck.By Mark Adkinson - July 13, 2010
Too bad they are not so “gentle” and understanding when it comes to people’s mistakes…
2 faces and 2 measures and the unability to separate a mistake from back hat techniques or any other regulations fault is what (unfortunatly) most characterizes Google these days…By Joao - July 13, 2010
This made me smile and gives me hope. If I’m so unsure of how so many things work, at least I know I’m in good company
By Jan - July 13, 2010
I’ve recently started a blog, the information you provide on this site has helped me tremendously. Thank you for all of your time & work.
By Exercise Balls - July 13, 2010
What do they care. Everyone knows about adwords anyway. It won’t matter if they ban it, they’ll get customers anyway. I’m sure they’ll correct it too.
By Vinny - July 14, 2010
LOL Jan, your comment make me laught!
By Joao - July 14, 2010
LOL: A Taste of their own medicine as they say
By Devereaux - July 19, 2010
[...] it’s not the first time this has happened. Back in 2010, Google banned their AdWords help pages because of cloaking; a black hat technique that serves up different pages to search engines and [...]
By Google Caught Buying Paid Links – Penalizes Their Own Website | RM2 Project - January 11, 2012
[...] it’s not the first time this has happened. Back in 2010, Google banned their AdWords help pages because of cloaking; a black hat technique that serves up different pages to search engines and [...]
By Google Caught Buying Paid Links – Penalizes Their Own Website « Miami Beach Web Designer - January 11, 2012
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