Google caught Volkswagen site in cloaking

A well-known car manufacturer, Volkswagen has recently completely redesigned its corporate website VW.com . The central part of the main page on the new site has become a large search form, which works on the basis of the Google Search Appliance, with a keyword cloud in the middle. These tags represent the most popular search queries, and here in the drop-down menus you can see the search results for them.



At first, Google’s managers commented positively on VW.com’s new design, and then discovered the “invisibleContent” HTML-class and accused the site of cloaking and violating Google’s search service policies.

It did not come to ban. Still, this is a corporate site of a huge company, and not a hack of black optimizers. Google employees contacted the technical director of the web studio that serves the VW site, and they promptly brought the site in line with Google’s rules. Keywords were transferred from the invisible layer to the “META” field.
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Previously, similar cases of cloaking were found on the BMW website and on the Google AdWords website , that is, Google managed to break its own rules.