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May 22, 2007

Is Yahoo! Autos Cloaking?

A WebmasterWorld thread links to a post at Agerhart.com showing screen shots of Yahoo! Autos cloaking.

Cloaking is when a search bot is given one page of content, while a normal user is given another set of content.

If you go to http://autos.yahoo.com/used-cars/forsale.html and compare it with the Google Cache version, to me they look identical. So possibly, Yahoo! changed it. But in the screen captures, only the Google version had the "used cars" anchor text by every state break down. You can see the before and after at Agerhart.com.

It seems like Yahoo Autos is currently not cloaking at this moment.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Tim Mayer of Yahoo! has confirmed on May 22nd edition of The Daily Search Cast that Yahoo Autos has changed the page since this has been reported. So, Yahoo Autos was cloaking. FYI, this wasn't the first time Yahoo! was caught cloaking, there also were spotted using unethical search practices in July 2005.

posted rustybrick in Cloaking / IP Delivery at May 22, 2007 8:05 AM Comments (4)

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Comments

They've removed the agent delivery and are now showing the page that was behind the scenes only being served to the bots.

 

Posted by agerhart at May 22, 2007 11:59

Add that to buying text links for Yahoo Travel and it is food for thought for sure.

Yahoo says do no spam
Yahoo does spam
Now how do we fix this here search engine??? duh

I get annoyed with this because I wish like in any good market there was more competition and choice, but Yahoo's messing it up for themselves!

 

Posted by Sam I Am at May 22, 2007 14:01

It's too bad most people don't understand what that means or why it matters, as it'd be great to see Yahoo! get some bad press.

Yahoo gives users information on 'political dissenters' to Chinese Police, who arrest them, and they get 10 years in prison for writing a blog post. I personally don't use any of their sites.

 

Posted by jeff419 at May 22, 2007 19:53

I totally agree with jeff419. Yahoo have been scumming up the net for years. I've blocked all content from them for the last 4 years.

 

Posted by Zorak#9 at May 23, 2007 01:47

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