Google Formally Goes Black Hat and Cloak

On a thread in Threadwatch.org it was pointed out by Adam C that Google may be using black hat techniques such as cloaking and keyword stuffing in order to achieve high rankings for its own pages. If this is true, then it violates Google’s own Terms of Service agreement. I wonder if this means that Google will ban itself from itself?

The Google page in question appeared when doing a search for “traffic estimate” and now appears to have been deleted by Google. Some members of the thread, however, did take snapshots of the offending pages for verification. Can anyone say, “double standard”?

I guess Google thought it was their turn to get caught since Yahoo!, MSN and AltaVista have already been caught cloaking at various times in the past. Now, doing the cloaking is one thing, but being caught is another.

In all actuality this is not a big deal since Google can do whatever it wants with its own search engine. It is however, entertaining to poke fun at a big corporation whenever they make a major gaff that cries out hypocrisy.

Google describes its own Page Rank system, “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

The “uniquely democratic nature of the web” reference has to be smiled at since the Google cloaking and keyword stuffing violates this basic building block which has been their foundation for years.

Like I said before, it is entertaining to watch a big corporation show off its “Do as I say, not as I do” mentality for public display. It makes one wonder if an episode of Apprentice should take place in the Google boardroom, where those responsible for the gaff are hauled before Larry and Sergey and afterwards someone or ones are sent home in a cab.

We will probably never know the outcome. But that’s Okay. One can just imagine the drama going on at the Googleplex right now.