Google has made the news again for all the wrong reasons and SEOs around the world are wondering why anyone is surprised Google is not playing by the rules. It’s old news that Google did some less than what may be considered legal coding to track iPhones. It’s older news that Google has been called out in Europe several times over for pulling some coding stunts get in and out of nearly everything even when they should be blocked. What is new in this round of news however is that Google has been caught getting creative with Internet Explorer now too.
Google found a way to bypass IE’s cookie settings by changing the way they presented their cookies to the IE browser which has a lot of people calling foul. The allegation is that Google is improperly representing their cookies as P3P which pass right through any of IE’s privacy settings – so even if you intentionally set your browser not to accept a certain type of cookie from Google, unless you know the specific non-standard code, you’re going to get them.
Google claims that isn’t the case at all, but everything that has been presented to this point is to the contrary. To this point, Google has failed to present any logical technical explanation for why P3P cookies are being used in place of the standard cookies that had been previously used – and seemingly only for IE. It’s a mess that the SEO world is watching closely yet again – and yet again it is a Google-centric mess that is seemingly nothing more than a half baked attempt to gain access where they aren’t wanted.
