Yahoo was caught cloaking! Yes, you read it right. One of the major search engines is violating its own rules against cloaking. If you look on Yahoo!'s "Search Content Quality Guidelines" it states that it considers unwanted those:

1. Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking
2. That use text that is hidden from the user
3. Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees
4. Pages built primarily for the search engines

It looks like the search engine giant is in hot water with a very difficult mess to explain and patch up. Will they punish themselves for violating their own rules? Agerhart.com published the alarming discovery:

I was doing some research to prepare for another post, but to my surprise I found something even juicier. Yahoo! is cloaking it's Autos pages, serving keyword stuffed pages to the SE crawlers and regular pages to the average users. I was browsing as Yahoo!'s Slurp crawler and therefore was able to see this.

Normally, I could care less if someone is spamming or using shady techniques. You do what you have to do to rank, and as long as you don't take a shot at me, all the power to ya. I don't believe in spam reports and I don't believe in snitching on competitors. BUT, I don't feel that this applies to the search engines. They are the ones placing the "quality guidelines", penalizing websites, banning websites, and trying to enforce the rules that they've made up. And they penalize and ban websites for less than what Yahoo! is doing above. How is that fair? With one hand you're going to ban a site and in effect reduce their revenue and with your other hand you employ the same strategies (or worse)? Come on now.