Is Amazon.com cloaking?

Or how do they get the attractive description in google?

[leifwessman]

A search for "books":

Amazon.com--Earth's Biggest Selection
Find, discover and buy books, music, DVDs, magazines, electronics, computers, software, housewares, tools and just about anything else. ...
Description: Books; includes personalized recommendations and wish lists for registered users.
Category: Shopping > Publications > Books > General Interest > A
www.amazon.com/ - 42k - 27 Mar 2003 - Cached - Similar pages - Stock quotes: AMZN

The text "Find, discover and buy books, music, DVDs, magazines, electronics, computers, software, housewares, tools and just about anything else." does not appear on their website. Cloaking?

Leif

[rfgdxm1]

It does appear in the meta description.

[leifwessman]

yes, but only in the cache. not when I visit the website.

[gsx]

DMOZ description?

[fiestagirl]

When you are searching at Google, you can tell if a site listing is from ODP from the category that shows under the description.

Category: Shopping > Publications > Books > General Interest > A

[Kennyh]

The DMOZ categories only show up for the specific page that's listed in DMOZ. For my site, it's the index page. Only when that page is returned in a Google search results page does the DMOZ category line appear. For every other page from my site that's returned in a search query, there's no DMOZ category line.

[Macguru]

>>yes, but only in the cache. not when I visit the website.

Yes, there can be a long way between www.amazon.com and www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/home/home.html/002-3479348-2094444

I dont know if this can be called 'cloaking'. I guess the bot wont follow the redirect.

[chameleon]

OK, let's be honest here -- do we all really think that sites like Amazon.com, Microsoft.com, IBM.com, Sun.com, etc. get the same treatment from Google as you or I do? I'd be shocked, and quite frankly, you'd have a hard time convincing me that the listings for these sites aren't doctored a bit -- for description or ranking.

[rfgdxm1]

It may also depend on whether Google thinks what amazon.com is doing is to deceive search engines, or just to help the search engines handle with their odd redirects? Amazon.com is so big that they don't need to cheat to come up for relevant searches.