“Black Hat” Yahoo?
A more than slightly amusing story caught my eye this morning as I did my daily trawl through the online SEO landscape. On agerhart.com is a report that Yahoo! have employed “cloaking” techniques on their Autos’ site. To those who don’t know what cloaking is, it’s the practice of serving up two different pages, one designed for normal users and a second that is designed only to be seen by search engine robots - the latter of which is usually keyword stuffed to increase its chances of appearing highly on the search engine results pages.
Strictly against their own guidelines, this technique is practiced by the so-called “black hat” search engine optimisation companies, where bending and breaking the rules is the norm - not something you would expect from one of the first and well-respected search engine/directory/portal sites on the web.
I don’t tend to go down the “whingeing about everything” route in my SEO ramblings, but talk about being caught with your hand in the cookie jar! Anyways, take a minute to read the full post over at agerhart.
Original blog post here
