Guess who’s cloaking now
In the most interesting Google and cloaking related story I’ve found lately, as you might notice from the lack of blogging, it seems that the New York Times is using cloaking technology on their web sites. I’m not sure who actually broke this story, but Danny Sullivan from search engine watch is quoted as saying that what the New York Times is doing looks like cloaking in his opinion.
What in fact is happening is that Googlebot is able to see the contents of the paid area for the New York Times without actually paying. This is shown by the fact that when someone searches for content on the new York times web site the information displayed in the Google pages is different than what a non subscriber would get if they went to the New York Times website.
This has always been one of the arguments I have seen in favor of cloaking. The ability to have your content indexed by certain IP addresses for search engines spiders, while not allowing people to see the content without at least some sort of registration. In my mind this is 100% in cloaking technology, but this is the type of cloaking that should be allowed. Keeping that in mind, the Google terms of service does not allow cloaking of any kind. So while I completely support this use of cloaking technology it seems only fair that Google would have to ban all of the web pages from the New York Times website. This is an obvious violation of terms of service and if Google makes an exception for a predominant web site such as the New York Times they leave themselves open two potential legal actions from site owners who have been banned under this policy.
Personally I don’t like either of those options. My personal preference would be to see the Google terms of service modified in such a way that cloaking technologies were allowed so long as certain criteria are met, with the intention behind those criteria to be displaying the same or extremely similar content to both the search engines spider and the end user. Of course that opens up another completely different set of problems where Google would end up having to view the contents of both a cloaked and uncloaked pages and then make their decision on whether or not the cloaking technology was the appropriately. That gets us into a whole subjective realm of what constitutes similar content.
So the bottom line here is that it would appear that Google is damned if they do anything and if they don’t. The chances of getting the New York Times to stop using the cloaking technology would appear to be slim at best and now that this is public knowledge if Google does nothing they may see other consequences.
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-06-19-n18.html
