Google Bans Google for Cloaking

Posted • July 7, 2010 • 1 Comment

AdWords Help Pages are Banned by Google for Cloaking

On July 1st Vanessa Fox published a post on Search Engine Land about Google breaking its own rules.

It appears even Google can’t follow their own rules.

Search for [google adwords help] or [adwords help] this morning on Google and the AdWords help center is nowhere to be found. Search for the URL itself, and it doesn’t appear to be in the index.

(Post from Search Engine Optimizician.)

Even Google finds it impossible to follow their own rules

According to Barry Schwartz this goes well beyond just the AdWords Help area, it appears this is how Google’s help sections work site wide.

When asked about these violations a spokesperson from Google said:

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.

Google eagerly admitted that those who work on Google products don’t have any special knowledge of search. The recent SEO report card they issued on Google products proves this. Google products have been found to be violating the webmaster guidelines in the past.

The Google support pages were banned in 2005 for cloaking. Early 2009, Google Japan was discovered buying links for PageRank, and swift action was taken by Google once again.

Google responded as soon as they were alerted to the infraction.

What can we learn from this?

• Don’t show search engines different content than you show users
• Make sure you don’t serve different content to search engines
• Don’t look to Google products as the shining examples of what to do for SEO
• Just because those teams work at Google, doesn’t mean they’re search experts

Read the full article at Search Engine Land.

Late,
Gary Pool SEO

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