Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
So it seems Google applies the time out penalty regardless of the size of a web site, regardless of AdSense income or not.
Google is doing great by sticking to their rules no matter who's doing the bad SEO. It may inconvenience searchers who are looking for BMW
It isn't even doing that, since Germany searcher who's capable of looking for "BMW" in a search engine should be capable of typing "bmw.de" in a browser.
By selecting a high-profile target, Google can make its point without inconveniencing any searcher who has an IQ over 80.
There is no competition in this world where cheating is "ignored". You get fifteen yard penalties, ejected from games, fined, barred for life, etc etc. "Oh, we discovered you are trying to fool so we are just going to ignore that." C'mon. If they caught everything 100% of the time, that would be one thing, but it is ludicrous to not penalize deliberate cheats when they are caught.
"Ignoring" might be read as "not counting the extra benefit that comes from cheating".
But if you look at sports, and e.g. a bicycle racer that "normally" would rank #5 in a big race is caught doping. "Ignoring" would mean awarding him 5th rank instead of kicking him where it hurts.
There have to be read lines and if you cross them there must be a penalty. (IMHO)
The site offers lots of content, which would rank well, if the site would be redesigned, so that all the entries in the database become available to the search engine.
If the company now uses cloaking to close this gap in such a way, that the result between a redesign and cloaking would be eventually the same, I wonder why the first option is ok and the later is
not?
I can only see benefits for both sides. Search engine results appear, which otherwise would have not shown up. Users find information, which they could not find before, because it did not exist in
the search result. The company saves money by not having to redbuild their entire website. Sometimes, especially in big companies that's not even an option, because systems grow over time.
Assuming that the content between the two is identical, then by googles SEO quality guidelines this would not even be considered cloaking, because the user and the search engine see or get the same results. The irony of this is that this is only true, if the website would be redesigned to what the cloaked pages look like.
So I guess the questions boils down to if you would really present the cloaked pages to the users? I think sometimes that's the case. And I think that cloaking sometimes is a win win situation. Go
ogle does not make this subtile distiction so, because it`s difficult to say when the milk turns sour.
Nevertheless punishing pages, which actually do not spam does not improve the search result. Spam is stuff that you are not interested in. But if you type in "used bmw m3" and you find a used car
portal having those kind of offers (using cloaking or not) what's wrong with that?
What do you think?
Furthermore the actual results are still not too bad - plenty of relevant sites. I would not assume that people who search for "BMW" are looking for the official site - they may be looking for dealers, information on the company, independent info on the cars etc - all those people also still have good search results.
Search engine results appear, which otherwise would have not shown up. Users find information, which they could not find before, because it did not exist in the search result.
A common misconception. When spamming sites are removed from the index, the actual number of results per SERP does not decrease, but remains the same. The gaps are filled by those sites whose user-visible content DOES match the search query. When spamming sites are removed from the index, they get replaced by sites the searcher was looking for. So AFTER the removal users find information which they could not find before.
If I am looking for a used car (one of the German keywords that bmw.de was cloaking for), I want to find portals or websites where used cars are sold. I do not want to go to a site of a company which only manufacturers new cars, it has no added value for the searcher. According to one of the sources on the net which revealed the BMW cloaking, on one of the user visible pages the German equivalent word of "used car" was mentioned only twice, where the cloaked version mentioned it 42 times.
The ultimate SE would deliver the results regardless of SEO. The role of a search engine is to help me find what I'm looking for and not to play the governor of the net.
SPOT ON!
And if this portal I'm speaking of would not show up at all in the search result, then search engine users would not be able to find it.
And the search result as a whole would not be as good as with those search results included. Of course without it you also find other results. That's for sure.
You are really talking about where it should appear in the result. But I guess that's very difficult, because you would have to look a concrete result set. But generally speaking, I guess it should appear at the top, if the site is about used cars.
Unfortuanltey search engines are not that fine grained yet to really make this important distinction.
Anyway, there would be no reason why this site should not show up, just because of cloaking. Unless - of course - the results would be off topic and not appropriate.
there are a few left to go, hope google will put them down, too. (since I put my black hat away I am kind of a militant white hat :-)
my 2 pennies,
P!
As soon as they get reincluded, I think they'll be able to look at their rankings and give themselves a good pat on the back!
Imagine how much Google Juice BMW
As far as I remember, it was a PR7 site.
Traffic to BMW.de has gone through the roof:
Anyone else noticed they also seem to have been removed from the Google licensed copy of the DMOZ database?
[google.com...]
[dmoz.org...]
