mar 16 p3

Report: Yahoo to Launch Adsense Competitor
Yahoo is reportedly testing a new contextual advertising program to compete with Google's Adsense program. Rumors had started when Overture product manager Ken Rudman placed contextual ads on his own blog. Investment firm UBS even upgraded Yahoo's stock to a "buy" rating based in part on expectations the portal giant will increase its Content Match product exposure. Currently, that contextual network remains available only to very large publishers. Raining on the parade, Jupiter Research's seldom sanguine Niki Scevak said that Adsense hasn't appeared to have done much for Google, and less might be expected from a similar entry by Yahoo.
source Mediapost

Google Responds to Cloaking Accusations;
Search-engine watchers this week widely noted the appearance of so-called "cloaking" on a set of user support pages on Google's AdWords advertising program. The pages were displaying different title information to Google's Web crawler than to regular visitors to the pages.
In one specific example cited in discussions at the Threadwatch Weblog, a support page about an AdWords traffic-estimating tool had displayed a title to the Google crawler that included keywords such as "traffic estimator" and "traffic estimate" and ranked high in Google search results.
Some Webmasters use cloaking as a way to rank higher in search-engine results, often by feeding keywords to crawlers. But Google, in particular, is critical of the practice. In its guidelines for Webmasters, the Mountain View, Calif., company warns that it may permanently remove sites from its index that engage in cloaking.
Late Tuesday, Google officials confirmed the discrepancy between what the AdWords pages were displaying to the Google crawler compared to what other visitors saw and attributed it to an internal mistake.
The additional keywords were meant only for the internal crawler serving Google's site search, spokesman Barry Schnitt said.
"We inadvertently showed additional information on product support pages to both Google's site search crawler and Google's main web crawler," Schnitt said in a statement. "We are in the process of making a technical change so that the pages show only the information available to users."