Nov 2, 2011 at 11:22am ET by Barry Schwartz

Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team, posted a long video that he named the "definitive cloaking video." Here is the video, I will post the main points below: Cloaking is showing different content to users than GoogleBot Cloaking Violation of Quality Guidelines Cloaking is High Risk It Is Often Used For Deceptive Reasons No Such Thing Has White Hat Cloaking Details on what might be perceived as cloaking is mentioned in the video Why geolocation and mobile detection is not cloaking Related Stories: Google Vows Renewed Look At Cloaking In 2011 Be Careful When Your A [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | SEO: Cloaking & Doorway Pages

Lessons Learned at SMX West: Google’s Panda Update, White Hat Cloaking & Link Building

Mar 12, 2011 at 1:36pm ET by Vanessa Fox

An amazing amount of great information came out of SMX West this week. Below is a summary of some of what I found to be the most actionable and useful. Google's Own Words About the Farmer/Panda Update Google's Matt Cutts said that while the change isn't 100% perfect, searcher feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. He noted that the change is completely algorithmic with no manual exceptions. Blocking "Low Quality" Content Matt reiterated that enough low quality content on a site could reduce rankings for that site as a whole. Improving the quality of the pages or removing the pages alto [...]

Google On Designing Mobile Friendly Websites

Feb 22, 2011 at 9:57am ET by Barry Schwartz

Pierre Far from Google wrote a blog post on how to design mobile friendly websites while considering Google's webmaster guidelines and best practices. I've pulled out the key points from this post in bullet format: Google differentiates between traditional mobile phones and smartphones. Google has two bots: Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. Googlebot crawls desktop-browser type of webpages and content embedded in them and Googlebot-Mobile crawls mobile content. Currently only traditional phones are supported with special useragent strings within Googlebot-Mobile, not smartphones (this [...]

Google Vows Renewed Look At Cloaking In 2011

Dec 28, 2010 at 9:58am ET by Barry Schwartz

The head of Google spam fighting team, Matt Cutts, has tweeted that Google will be looking more at cloaking in the first quarter of 2011, perhaps with more clarification of what exactly cloaking is. Cloaking, which is against Google's webmaster guidelines, is defined by Google as follows: Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index. Matt's tweet read: Google will more at cloaking in Q1 2011. Not j [...]

Why Google Should Ban Its Own Help Pages — But Also Shouldn’t

Jul 6, 2010 at 1:42pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Google takes pride in showing how it will enforce its anti-spam rules even against itself, but apparently there's a limit to how far it will go. Google is declining to ban many of its own help pages that were published in violation of its webmaster guidelines. That's wrong for the reasons has Google's stated. But it's right if it means a more common sense approach to its rules may come out of this. Google's Help Area & Cloaking In particular, Google has a long-standing rule against "cloaking," where a web site shows a search engine content that's different from what a human would see [...]

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