I saw some news on Threadwatch that pointed to a site that exposed some of Yahoo’s search engine cloaking.
Interestingly, Yahoo also cloaks on del.icio.us. I noticed this because I surf with the Search Status Firefox Extension set to highlight all rel=nofollow links with a pink color.
As shown below, the home page has all of the internal links with rel=nofollow applied. Notice the pink color on all of the links, including the internal navigation on the right side:
A look at the source code shows that there is a robots meta tag with noarchive, nofollow, and noindex applied:
This is a sure sign of cloaking because pages from del.icio.us are frequently found in Google’s SERPs.
When visiting del.icio.us with Googlebot as the user-agent, the rel-nofollow disappears from the internal links on the right-navigation, and the robots meta tag disappears:
2 Comments
That is really weird. Is removing nofollow really cloaking? Or is it to ward off spammers who might see nofollow and stay away from del.icio.us?
It’s cloaking (sending different content to search engines than is sent to browsers), but it doesn’t seem well thought-out. Why rel=nofollow the internal links? That is a sure indication of cloaking. The external links have rel=nofollow on them even when visiting as Googlebot, so shouldn’t that be enough to deter spammers?