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‘Cloaking’ is a word that for some years has come to be most often used in the search engine optimisation industry. It is used to describe a website which has been configured to show one page to a visiting search engine spider such as the Googlebot, and a very different page to you and me. The idea is that Google finds a page loaded with keywords and perfectly optimised, awarding it a top ten search position, real visitors increase as a consequence but are presented with the actual webpage… which may or may not be as relevant. For about five years ‘cloaking’ has been pretty heavily penalised and as an SEO technique all but dropped. However, I am still aware of several large publishers using what appears to be a form of cloaking to drive traffic whilst protecting content with a subscription barrier / log-in.

To clarify, I am referring to cases whereby the Googlebot has been allowed to index a publisher’s full website of articles, giving the site some nice search results – and better ones than they would get if only a small part of the article was been indexed. ‘Caching’ has been switched off, so that users of Google cannot view the cached page and bypass the subscription barrier - which blocks access when attempting to open the page at source.

A Matt Cutts blog entry back in March went some way to addressing the issue, specifically with reference to Webmaster World (WMW), which had thousands of forum listings in Google that were inaccessible without a paid-for subscription. Brett Tabke, the owner of WMW addressed the issue and now the forum pages are accessible to all – hooray. Matt Cutts’ blog entry however continues to be popular 6 months on, with comments continuing on the topic (270+ comments), The New York Times seems to have been discussed many times as does the behaviour of many other sites.

Today I noticed that Science Magazine behaves in a similar way; A search of ‘Britain Hunts Down CJD Epidemic‘ returns a listing with a link to: www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/281/5382/1422
Clicking the link in Google however takes you to a different page:
www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/281/5382/1422
This is not the page Google has indexed, if it was I think the URL would have matched up already. Instead the page I am redirected to contains a short text abstract and a link to the full text URL… the one which I was originally told by Google I was accessing anyway… and I can’t access it because I need a subscription.

A Google search of ‘site:www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/’ shows 101,000 pages matching that string, some of which open in full, but some redirect to an abstract URL because access is blocked. I’m not sure what’s going on, but with caching off and a lot of content inaccessible but indexed, it makes me ask the question – Is this cloaking or clever marketing? It’s certainly sensible to show a snippet of content to try and make the visitor hungry enough to buy a subscription, I suspect that it break the rules on cloaking though in order to get the search positions, so I won’t be following suit.

Technorati Tags: cloaking, seo, optimisation, spam, webmaster world, science magazine, matt cutts, google, googlebot, web publishing,

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