How about a little old skool search spam? OK, Philipp over at Google Blogoscoped points out in
BMW’s
Doorway Pages that the automaker is employing hidden content on its web site
in Germany. Search engines see one thing; humans another. It’s cloaking, but not
IP based, more of the “poor man’s” variety that uses JavaScript.
Look at this
page.
You’ll see nice, pretty pictures of BMWs. Philipp then illustrates how when you
turn off JavaScript, you get a page of completely different content, including
the use of the word “used car” 42 times in what appears to be a gibberish
doorway page. That’s a page where the sentences may look like they are saying
something to a search algorithm but make no sense to a human reader.
When I disable JavaScript, I actually don’t see what Philipp got. Instead, I
get a page telling me that I need to have JavaScript to view the site. Part of
this seems to be due to some redirection going on. But here’s an easy way to see
what Google’s actually being shown — this
page from the Google cache.
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