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Amazon and the Anti-Cloak
March 06, 2006
I found something interesting poking around between Google and Amazon.
If you go to this page at Amazon, you'll see a page devoted to a specific book about C# programming.
But if you arrive at that same Amazon page via a Google search for [c# programming] - my search shows the Amazon page at spot 9 - the page contains additional dynamic data that suggests Amazon is integrating the Google search query into the HTML.
When you arrive via Google, the first "special" area appears near the top - a gray bar just under the Amazon search box - showing other related searches that a user might be interested in.
A little later on, Amazon does a similar job, using a variation of the technique that has doubtless made them millions of additional dollars over the years: the old "customers who bought this title also bought..." spiel:
Cloaking? Technically, yes. Google doesn't see either bit of query based data in its cached version of the page.
But it shows Google less data than it shows the user, so there's very little chance that this technique is helpful from a purely SEO-based perspective. No, this is user-focused, all the way. And it's another reason why blanket, binary statements like "cloaking is bad" do everyone from webmasters to SEO practitioners a giant disservice.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at March 6, 2006 05:01 PM
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