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Google Banning Itself For Cloaking?
(rt) In a somewhat belated response to the recent discovery that Google are blatantly cloaking to influence their own search results, Googleguy, the search engines inofficial (and, hence, patently deniable) forum rep on Webmasterworld forum explains their rationale and announces that the offending pages have been removed, “To be consistent with our guidelines”.
Of course, what’s really interesting isn’t the lame excuses Google reps are flaunting after having been found out in their efforts to ward of what is essentially a PR disaster – it’s the fact that even mighty Google with all their hyped super duper power technology saw no other possibility of manipulating their search applications’ results than resorting to (low power, UserAgent based) cloaking.
So let’s reiterate that it’s not a question of morals or ethics, it’s a technological issue. (And yes, regular patrons of fantomNews will recall that this has been our position right from day one.)
As Nick Wilson of Threadwatch, where the discovery was first posted, rightly points out:
their unofficial rep chooses a safe haven to make his excuses […] I assume he’s joking, funniest thing i’ve read in a long time heh …
Well, we all know that he probably isn’t, making it even funnier.
Read the mildy ridiculous WMW forum thread here:
→ “Google News”
And do read Nick’s take too:
→ “Google Bans itself for Cloaking? – ROTFLMAO!”
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[Keywords: cloaking, IP delivery, penalization, search engines cloaking ]
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