Matt Cutts Provides More Cloaking Giggles

By David A. Utter - Wed, 11/28/2007 - 1:11pm.

A Danish company provided the daily allowance of raised eyebrows for its claim of offering undetectable cloaking techniques.

As the cliché goes on Fark, someone didn't think their cunning plan all the way through.

Google's Matt Cutts told a new tale of "undetectable webspam" being spun in Denmark. No more languishing in the dregs of search results, thanks to this approach, ho ho.

Their claim held up about as well as Yahoo's merchant servers did on Cyber Monday (ie, not very well). Shortly after uncovering the unnamed Danish company's claims, Matt and another Googler quickly found some problems with their puffed-up stance:

That’s right, someone hasn’t configured their "undetectable" cloaking script correctly. The errors that the script is spewing out give absolute file paths and much more info. Digging into the details mentioned in the error messages quickly leads you to more domains. So much for that cloaking being undetectable. By the way, this cloaking script has been producing highly noticeable errors like this for almost two months.

The undetectable cloaking had been tossing out easily detectable errors with helpful descriptions and the word "cloaking" displayed prominently. Hey Danish webcloaking company? You're doing it wrong.

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News Tags: Google, SEO, Cloaking, Matt Cutts, Twitter, Black Hat, Attention

About the author:
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Follow me on Twitter, and you can reach me via email at dutter @ webpronews dot com. Why not Mixx this article while you're here?

Comments

Submitted by Mofamike (WPN reader) on Thu, 11/29/2007 - 5:06am.

Catching Attention

by stating such things like cloaking/cheating/stuffing techniques may turn into the opposite of what was intended. It reveals last century thinking of the danish company and gives proof that they
a) don't undestand much about SEO as modern SE like Google have different approach of measuring importance of websites (that cannot be tweaked by cloaking) and
b) the danish company apparently suffers from having only small/unimportant (or maybe no) customers as serious SEO companies caring for big enterprises websites wouldn't risk such statements destroying the reputation of both.

And yes, undetected cloaking is possible. But only as long as it doesn't lead to success and nobody takes care of the result. Conclusion: It's a waste of time, nothing else.

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