• SEOmoz, Monday, April 14, 2008 12:46 PM

During a Web site review session at SMX Sydney, Rand Fishkin and Danny Sullivan discovered that Flightcentre.com, a well-known Australian travel site, had been cloaking content from fellow travel site DiscoverTasmania.com.

The panelists copied and pasted a snippet of content from DiscoverTasmania.com into a Google search and found Flightcentre.com outranking it for the exact same phrase. A further dig found no mention of the content on the referenced page itself, but a look into Flightcentre.com's source code (sans Javascript and as the Google-bot) showed that the latter site was indeed, cloaking content that it had copied from DiscoverTasmania.com.

While the panelists couldn't find out whether Flightcentre.com had legitimate reasons for copying and cloaking DiscoverTasmania.com's content, Fishkin says that the discovery (in front of fellow panelist and Google search evangelist Adam Lasnik, no less) didn't reflect well on one of Australia's largest travel companies.

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