Google vs. MSN on Paid Links and Cloaking

Over the holiday break, Jeremiah Andrick, product manager for MSN Live Webmaster Tools, stopped by our offices. We did a lengthy video interview, you might notice that Jeremiah says to avoid paid links. Apparently, the Live Search crew has reevaluated their stance on paid links. Live Search's Nathan Buggia, in an email on the subject of paid linking said the following:

The operative phrase here is "a gray area". That's not saying paid links are forbidden or evil or a bannable offense. Some paid links are crap, some… not so much so. Live Search is working on methods to evaluate and qualify links - paid or otherwise - before they ascribe authority to them.

When Jeremiah says in the video to avoid paid links, it would be more appropriate to rephrase that as 'avoid bad (irrelevant/junk) linking'.

Webmasters have issues with Live Search indexing sites properly. I asked Jeremiah what he thought people were running into when Live Search wasn't properly indexing them.

Jeremiah said most indexing issues fall into one of three categories:

1. Problems with design

2. Problems with content

3. Technological issues

According to Jeremiah, "It tends to be technological issues, or the content itself, that's the problem," when people are having trouble being indexed correctly. "Most people are kind of hip to using better structure in their site," so design isn't as often the culprit.

Jeremiah cited a mix between design and content as a specific problem. "Most publishing systems and CMSs a lot of people are using were designed 3 or 4 years ago," he said, before the now widespread recognition of the importance of crawlability and SEO in site design. As a result, some of these systems aren't exactly the most efficient or effective in making a site's content crawlable.

In terms of being totally optimized, Jeremiah said, "People do what they can, but I don't think they always do enough or that they are not necessarily doing the right things".

But even under ideal circumstances, Jeremiah admits "you're not going to get everybody and you're not going to get everything out of everybody." As proof, Jeremiah offered a poignant example: "MSDN TechNet is a tier 1 site with eight or nine million documents in 42 different languages... I can tell you that it is not 100% indexed."

Their goal is likely common to all search engines... 100% indexability of everything. But that is just not a reality at this stage of search evolution.

We're all pretty clear on Google's position on cloaking by now. It's a pretty simple and straightforward 'no'. Never. Under no circumstances. It's evil, it's bad, it's spammy. Don't do it.

While MSN Live doesn't exactly endorse cloaking, they do seem to have a slightly softer stance on the issue. Jeremiah and I talked about companies who make heavy use of Flash and other non indexable graphics on their sites.

At one point, we talked about Nike, whose site is made completely out of Flash. Jeremiah was quite up front about it, saying, "They break some of our rules just to get to the point where they can get all of their content indexed. They do a bit of cloaking and things like that."

Google of course,

All pretty standard party line stuff. With the exception of their obvious difference in their stance on cloaking, and paid links, it could have been a Matt Cutts interview in many respects.