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With Google having IMO probably the most clever technical staff going, their obvious distain for cloaking will soon translate into some very unhappy and unlisted cloaking fans, opinions?
If Google doesn't like it, then only do it for the other SE's and directories. Is this correct?
Tell me what is more egregious than steeling content without the web master's or the sight owners permission. What is more egregious than blatant copyright violation?
Craig Silverstein, you hate cloaking because it gets in the way of Google's profiting from theft.
Could you elaborate on that point?
But there is more to it. Every time a surfer clicks on the cache they remain at google (as oppose to moving into the realm of another website). This gives google a longer opportunity to convert the surfer into revenue (ad feeding). They use our work on their site to keep people on their site. Their opportunity gained is our loss.
The branding effect of having the surfer captive has also been mentioned, which in theory will convert into future earnings.
But it won't last. If the RIAA could effectively shut down napster...
All in all, I'd be more than happy to help them with "branding" if they'd start paying an affiliate fee for their search boxes again! ;)
I wonder if they could effectively implement some kind of opt-out procedure for the cache? It would be easy to put a check box on the submit URL form, where you checked whether you would or would not permit caching of your site, but that wouldn't cover sites they discovered through spidering...
That would work great, if they actually crawled submitted sites, but they don't. Their cache system should be opt-in, not opt-out. Their new anti-cloaking stance is just a ploy to make sure that legitimate non-cloaked sites that simply don't want their content stolen won't start using the noarchive tag.
Yeah, just send xyz.com a letter asking them to "please market my site for me...pretty please!?" Yeah! That works all the time.
You are welcome and invited to discuss issues with the community. I think you'd be extremely surprised at the level of support you'd receive on various issues. Showing up at a search engine conference for wet collar newbies is not dicussing thing with the community. Taking sniper shots at the community in interviews is not going to win Google any friends or support.
Having roots in the "geek" edu community, I think webmasters have a kinship and common heirtage with Google that could benefit both parties. For an engine that we have - for the most part supported and promoted like no other engine before it - to make the kinds of statements made in that interview, is rather a shock. I can't help but think that like Yahoo no longer being Yahoo!, Google is no longer Google.
I think the phrase "totally separate content" is the key to Goog's position and needs defining. If I serve Googlebot a page with identical text, simply remove the tables, images and extraneous "eye candy" type HTML, is Goog happy or unhappy?
It's a rhetorical question... Don't everybody jump in with an opinion! Call it Googlebait! Perhaps they will respond, here or in an interview somewhere... And no, I don't still believe in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus! But one can hope...
The operative word being "priority". It's a non-threatening thing to say. For "priority" read "relevance". If it's as relevant to the search engines as it is to the user, there's no problem. I don't think anyone should worry if they are delivering good targetted traffic via IP delivery.
Of course nobody *should* worry, if they're cloaking legitimately. However, the phrasing in that interview was (as is the case with most of Google's various statements on the issue) vague enough that you really can't say.
Anyone could analyze the text of that interview and Google's past statements on the subject, and interpret it to mean just about anything they wanted to:
1. Google will ban any cloaked site they find
2. Google will only ban sites who use cloaking where the "spider food" page has deceptively different content than the "human food" page.
3. Google will ban any html-based site for cloaking, because it's "not necessary" unless you're using a technology like Flash...
4. etc., etc., etc....
The question I have is this: Does Google have the ability or the willingness to devote the necessary human resources for intelligently evaluating whether or not a cloaked site should be banned or not on a case-by-case basis? I think not.
If they were actually looking at cloaked sites and saying, "this one's OK, but that one should go," based on coherent guidelines they could give specific cloaking rules to the public as to what was acceptable and what wasn't. They won't say anything definite, so my impression is that if they catch you they may or may not ban you, but the process is completely arbitrary and incomprehensible, even to most everyone inside the Google compound.
Some alternative view points from Google:
Sergey and Larry to duke it out over cloaking [google.com]:
"...at a search engine meeting in Boston, Larry Page of Google was quoted as saying, "Any page submitted through Google's Add URL form that doesn't have links pointing *to* the page from elsewhere on the Web will be treated as spam." Sergey's response? "I'm not sure what Larry was drinking at the time." He said this wasn't the case at all. How does Google feel about cloaking? "Cloaking has some good benefits," said Sergey. "But the content can't be different."
From Robin Nobles at an Online Web Training Chat: [google.com]
"Sergey Brin with Google said that they don't consider any specific tactics to be spamming -- and he also said that there are definite uses for cloaking,"
Briefly, the issue was the way that Google was presenting straight HTML results to a user searching on a WAP mobile phone. Needless to say, it produced garbage. I was trying to get him to understand the need to present the WAP optimized (WML) version of the page instead... he said I should just detect the Google spider and present the WML version.
<added>Not to mention the expense and hassle of rate at which they'd be going through IP addresses, as people added the new "non-spider" spider IPs to their cloaking scripts...</added>
Xoc...ink's been doing just that for what? Almost 2 years?
MIB99! There's a blast from the past eh?
