Google vs. MSN on Paid Links and Cloaking (Part 5)
This article is by Mike. He is a manager at the iEntry and has been there since 2000. Do you think you should buy paid links? I have been getting request from people that wish to buy links from me. Read more and decided if you want to sell links on your site.
Cloaking:
We’re all pretty clear on Google’s position on cloaking by now. It’s a pretty simple and straightforward ‘no’. Never. Under no circumstances. It’s evil, it’s bad, it’s spammy. Don’t do it.
While MSN Live doesn’t exactly endorse cloaking, they do seem to have a slightly softer stance on the issue. Jeremiah and I talked about companies who make heavy use of Flash and other non indexable graphics on their sites.
At one point, we talked about Nike, whose site is made completely out of Flash. Jeremiah was quite up front about it, saying, “They break some of our rules just to get to the point where they can get all of their content indexed. They do a bit of cloaking and things like that.”
Google of course, still indexes Nike. I’m pretty sure if MSN knows they cloak, Google can probably figure it out as well. I don’t look for Nike to suffer any Google penalties - much less be thrown out of the index for it though. However, if you aren’t Nike but maybe just a smaller webmaster, I don’t know that you’d be afforded the same considerations from Google. I’d just about bet on it.
On one hand you have Google, who apparently selectively enforces their strict no-cloaking policy depending on who you are. On the other hand, you have MSN saying sure, it goes on and while we don’t encourage it, we aren’t necessarily going to boot you from the index for it. Interesting, no?
Filed under: Webmasters
