I was doing some research to prepare for another post, but to my surprise I found something even juicier. Yahoo! is cloaking their (fixed typo for the professor) Autos pages, serving keyword stuffed pages to the SE crawlers and regular pages to the average users. I was browsing as Yahoo!’s Slurp crawler and therefore was able to see this.

Below are two screenshots. The first thumbnail on the left is what you will see on this page, http://autos.yahoo.com/used-cars/forsale.html, if you are crawling as Slurp. The second thumbnail on the right is what you will see on the same page if you are surfing as a normal user.

So, they are clearly serving different content to their users and to the search engines. The pages they’re serving to the bots are heavily keyword stuffed. I honestly don’t know where they could cram the word “used cars” on the page again. It’s everywhere.

If you look on Yahoo!’s “Search Content Quality Guidelines” it states:

What Yahoo! Considers Unwanted
Some, but not all, examples of the more common types of pages that Yahoo! does not want include:

• Pages that harm accuracy, diversity or relevance of search results
• Pages dedicated to directing the user to another page
• Pages that have substantially the same content as other pages
• Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames
• Pages in great quantity, automatically generated or of little value
• Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking
• The use of text that is hidden from the user
• Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees
• Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site’s apparent popularity
• Pages built primarily for the search engines
• Misuse of competitor names
• Multiple sites offering the same content
• Pages that use excessive pop-ups, interfering with user navigation
• Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent or provide a poor user experience

I’d say the page in question above falls into all of those items I highlighted above. Yahoo! is repeating the keyword “used cars” over and over to inflate their search engine rankings. The text is hidden from the user. It is giving the search engines different content than what the end-user sees. And lastly, this page is built primarily for the search engines.

Normally, I could care less if someone is spamming or using shady techniques. You do what you have to do to rank, and as long as you don’t take a shot at me, all the power to ya. I don’t believe in spam reports and I don’t believe in snitching on competitors. BUT, I don’t feel that this applies to the search engines. They are the ones placing the “quality guidelines”, penalizing websites, banning websites, and trying to enforce the rules that they’ve made up. And they penalize and ban websites for less than what Yahoo! is doing above. How is that fair? With one hand you’re going to ban a site and in effect reduce their revenue and with your other hand you employ the same strategies (or worse)? Come on now.