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Originally Posted by TenTonJim
Hello everyone,
First post here at WebProWorld. I am also over at the sitepoint forums http://sitepoint.com.
I know ethically that cloaking is considered bad seo practice, but how does a spider know that is it getting cloaked pages?
Say I am using ASP, and am determining the presence of MSIE, FireFox, Gecko, Opera etc etc in the HTTP_USER_AGENT string when a visitor arrives at the site, and feeding browsers visual content and spiders gratuitous text... how does the spider know this? It seems tht only dmoz or perhaps yahoo would know it was being cloaked.
I don't practice this but am curious as to how a spider determines cloaking.
Thanks! |
"Ethically" would be a bad word choice - as it implies deception.
Google deploys cloaking technology to redirect users to their regional version of Google, as well as limiting Adwords from displaying in results for say a user on Google.com but located in UK where UK was not selected as an ad placement. In both instances Google isn't being deceptive.
Notwithstanding, whether used for the right (or wrong) reason the user agent can't tell (unless specified and even then Googlebot would unlikely know this as a deception tactic) - thus if used for the wrong reason is the only concern and in this instance a spam report would be needed to get Google to take a closer look.
I would add though - this is of my opinion - I am not professionally versed in cloaking technology just using common sense.