In the most interesting Google and cloaking related story I've found lately, it seems that the New York Times is using cloaking technology on their web sites.
Danny Sullivan from search engine watch is quoted as saying that what the New York Times is doing looks like cloaking in his opinion.
What in fact is happening is that Googlebot is able to see the contents of the paid area for the New York Times without actually paying. This is shown by the fact that when someone searches for content on the new York times web site the information displayed in the Google pages is different than what a non subscriber would get if they went to the New York Times website.
This has always been one of the arguments I have seen in favor of cloaking. The ability to have your content indexed by certain IP addresses for search engines spiders, while not allowing people to see the content without at least some sort of registration. In my mind this is 100% in cloaking technology, but this is the type of cloaking that should be allowed
.However Google terms of service does not allow cloaking of any kind.
So what will happen, will google drip the new york times from its index, or will they let it slide?
