Webmaster World Finally Goes down for Cloaking?
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UPDATE 3/3/07 In the interest of being honest with the reader, I must admit that the premise of this post was shown to be wrong, looks like there is a known bug with the site: command that is unrelated to the issue of cloaking or being deindexed. HOWEVER, my time-line still is true and Matt Cutts finally addresses the issue in a fair and open post here. Hopefully this issue will be fully fixed soon.
Unedited article starts below:
The discussion about some sites like Webmasterworld and the NY Times being able to show Googlebot their sites content and then require a log-in from an actual person has being going on for some time now. Most notably, in my opinion, has been WebmasterWorld Cloaking? , Google Allows Misrepresented Result Snippets , and Does Google Allow Cloaking When They Like the Site?
The issue has been raised at the official Google webmaster forum as well in such threads as Subscription Cloaking and SEO indexing Legalities.
It’s been brought up multiple times on Matt Cutts blog namely in a post where he tries to explain how one can sign up for WMW for free.
Late last week there was at least an addressing of the issue by Matt Cutts in this completley unrelated thread about selling links, where he states:
…you mention cloaking and WMW, but you may not know that I told the administrator of WMW earlier this year that the site would be removed if it met the definition of cloaking. As the result, the administrator of WMW made code changes to WMW. I haven’t circled back around to check on that issue recently, but any site that violates our quality guidelines can be removed from our index, and that would include WMW if we found that it violated our quality guidelines.
Adam Lasnik did mention a while back in November that they were going be announcing a solution to the subscription based indexing, but we haven’t heard much about it since.
Today WMW appears to be on its way out of the Google index with just 350 URLs listed and most of them old, today’s results saved here. It’s tough to tell as they don’t allow caching of the site.
Is there a pending announcement coming soon regarding subscription based indexing? Is WMW finally being called to task and having to play by the same rules? Perhaps the deindexing of WMW is just a prelude to Matt’s aforementioned blog post.
I’m sure of one thing, that this isn’t over, and we’ll see more regarding this subject soon.
I’ll try to update the situation as soon as more information is known.
