Comments on: Cloaking Your Hummer

By: Ro

Ro — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 22:38:14 +0000

I don’t know if they still do it but acura.com was doing some serious cloaking about a year ago that allowed them to deep link into flash. Google “site:acura.com” and start clicking results you’ll see what I mean. I tried doing something similar with one of my flash sites and google took it out of the index completely, so yea, not exactly fair…

By: TheMadHat

TheMadHat — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 02:22:09 +0000

“…without flash or javascript enabled is the same exact text that you get in the â€œH1â€³ section of the flash.”

Not really. If they were going to be completely white hat about it they would have a page for each section just like in the flash. Adding the content from the entire H1 category to 1 page is a little borderline. Hummer certainly won’t get smacked on it but the chances are high your average everyday Joe will get smacked by the spam coppers.

Just because it looks nice and it’s formatted doesn’t mean it complies with “the holy guidelines”

By: Reuben Yau

Reuben Yau — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 20:34:37 +0000

I came across a company that sells CMS packages specifically to the auto industry. I looked at a few of their customers and was totally amazed at all the cloaking and shady techniques they were employing. Sounds very similar to what you’re describing. If Google does decide to dish out a penalty, you might find a bunch of auto websites disappearing overnight.

By: numlock

numlock — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 09:14:37 +0000

I wouldn’t call showing different content depending the user’s JS/flash setting as cloaking at all. Unless you regard showing an HTML page in lieu of a flash page cloaking as well.

By: Jab

Jab — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 08:17:28 +0000

Hummer, like everthing else.

By: Josh

Josh — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 05:31:34 +0000

Interesting find. It looks like the JavaScript is checking to see whether Flash is installed. If it is then the page overlays the SWF file on top of the HTML, else sends you to http://www.hummer.com/?goto_page=/h1/highlights/h1_highlights_story.swf&goto_nav=h1&country=us

Nice contrast between the design quality of the HTML and Flash versions…

By: Haentz

Haentz — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 05:26:17 +0000

I wouldn’t say they crossed the threshold to real cloaking here.
What you get, when you visit the h1.html without flash or javascript enabled is the same exact text that you get in the “H1″ section of the flash. It’s even nicely formatted, so it really qualifies as a no-flash version of the same content in the flash. The flash is opened by the swfobject routine, which does not redirect to another page, but rather rewrites the non-flash content of the page with the flash object.
I don’t see real cloaking going on here. It’s just the way to show search engines (and no-flash people) your flash-content.