Ingenta

From Eureka

Ingenta is a division of Publishing Technology plc that markets and distributes content for academic and research publishers. They maintain an online presence through IngentaConnect. Additional general information is available on Wikipedia.

Ingenta engages in the controversial practice of cloaking to promote subscription-only content through Internet search engines. According to Engineering Manager Leigh Dodds, Ingenta began collaborating with Google, Inc. in early 2004^[1] to display cloaked links to its full-text articles via Google's main search listings. More recently, Dodds has asserted^[2] that Ingenta no longer cloaks through Google (though retaining the practice for other unspecified search engines). In the supposedly non-cloaking technique now implemented, Ingenta passes metadata to the Googlebot directing it to full-text articles, while instructing Googlebot to display a different URL to Google users. Critics are likely to counter that this does, in fact, constitute black-hat cloaking as it still provides different content to the search engine crawler than to the search engine user.

For more details, see these references:

In the course of the joint effort with Google, Dodds commented that "[w]ith [Ingenta's] content appearing in the Google indexes it's been interesting to watch the referral traffic increase very nicely."^[3]
Google's benefit from breaking its own anti-cloaking policy remains unknown, but involvement of Google's marketing department in the matter is evidenced by their gift of a Frisbee to Mr. Dodds.^[4] ^[5]
An example of cloaking by Ingenta in August 2007.^[6]

Example Google search yielding a cloaked Ingenta link on 8/17/07. Note the circled search word and its appearance in the snippet of the circled result. Note also that the result is tagged as a .PDF by Google.

Web page served by Ingenta from above Google referral. It is not a .PDF. The page also does not contain the circled search word that appeared in the snippet, and furthermore, does not provide an abstract as required by Google Scholar.