Google and Cloaking

[brucet]

Once upon a time there was a clever SEO specialist who found a way of misleading Google without being blacklisted for cloaking. He used it on all his sites, and for a while he enjoyed great success. Other people picked up his method, and copied what he was doing. Pretty soon Google noticed what was going on, and blacklisted the whole lot of them...

IMO it's not what works now that you need to worry about. In the future, Google will enforce it's policy in whatever way it deems necessary to maintain the integrity of its results.

[kgun]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Cloaking: Serving different content to users than to Googlebot. This is a violation of our webmaster guidelines. If the file that Googlebot sees is not identical to the file that a typical user sees, then you're in a high-risk category. A program such as md5sum or diff can compute a hash to verify that two different files are identical.

Ok, let us quote:

<cite>


Quality guidelines - basic principles

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Quality guidelines - specific guidelines

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don't send automated queries to Google.
• Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

If you determine that your site doesn't meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and then submit your site for reconsideration.
</cite>

Here Cloaking, sneaky Javascript redirects, and doorway pages is an important page.

Now remember, this may be Guidelines for a Web 1.0 even before Google used AJAX technologies themself. How do you think Google maps and Google suggest would function without AJAX technologies?

Originally Posted by spiderbait

Do you have the ability to detect whether a user's browser is equipped with a screen reader of some sort?

If so, you could do a conditional include based on that detection.

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Oh my God. Good point though.

Well screenreaders are desktop software like Jaws and WindowEyes. Maybe someone can help me out at this case?

So far I know, they use the browser (user-agent) of the user.

If you can not use i(Frames) I think this is a good alternative. I already wrote about this months ago on my own site, (see third link in my signature).

<cite>
When ( if) you (already) understand JavaScript and JavaScript Objects, the natural next step is to learn PHP. PHP is a powerful language that support the most important database plattforms as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase and MS SQL server. As an example, consider you have a database connection class for MySQL and PostgreSQL. Both share a common method (API), query. Then you may use the same code on different database servers. I can also highly recommend the Sitepoint book: "Build your own AJAX Web Applications." That is another soft introduction to object oriented programmen where you learn a lot of technologies in addition to developing your own web applications. In addition it has explicite sections on how you shall make accessible web applications for disabled users. The idea is to show content for people with disabilities using simple CSS stylesheets and hide that content for able users. Excellent book where you learn much.
</cite>

Note:
Technologies evolves and SE's have to pick up. Neither way, I can not see problems using different stylesheets, unless you use it to improve / manipulate your SERP position or your ranking.

[kgun]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Are you sure SE cannot read text on graphics? (WO/2008/003095) RECOGNIZING TEXT IN IMAGES

And note the following:
Some examples of cloaking include:

• Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users.

I think it is still difficult for SE BOTs to do OSCR scanning and using the bitmap to read / find text on the image.

I use an image to hide my email address for spam bots. In an ideal world there are no problems an no need for exceptions.

I think this W3C And Its Relevance To Advanced Web Design Technology thread is timely.

[full house]

Only few webmaster do and experience the penalty of Google though cloaking. . .Does your site will get in sandbox or permanently remove.

[2fk]

IMO i think if G will noticed that they will surely ban the site...so better don't take the risk..

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by full house

Only few webmaster do and experience the penalty of Google though cloaking. . .Does your site will get in sandbox or permanently remove.

Originally Posted by 2fk

IMO i think if G will noticed that they will surely ban the site...so better don't take the risk..

To both, how does withholding non-editorial content from an SE constitute material misrepresentation? Absent the latter, there is no cloaking.

[activeco]

Originally Posted by activeco

Congratulations. You are at the first position (in two days) for the phrase "Hidding content from search engines" (without quotes), out of 224000 results. Cloaking does pay, at least in the begin.
Let's see how long you will stay there.

OK, you dropped to 102-nd position, looks like -100 penalty.
But you were impatient and added more stuff at once and now you don't know what caused the sink;
<div rel="noindex">, your screenreader menu or something third.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by activeco

OK, you dropped to 102-nd position, looks like -95 penalty.
But you were inpatient and added more stuff at once and now you don't know what caused the sink;
<div rel="noindex">, your screenreader menu or something third.

Nope. That is not the case. I changed the word hidding in the title. The word was misspelled and corrected to hiding.
Should I change it back to see the effect?

[Webnauts]

I changed the title back. Now I mispelled the word hiding again. Lets see what comes next.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by 2fk

IMO i think if G will noticed that they will surely ban the site...so better don't take the risk..

No one is taking any risks. We are running a test on a domain which is setup for such purposes.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by full house

Only few webmaster do and experience the penalty of Google though cloaking. . .Does your site will get in sandbox or permanently remove.

Can you tell some examples?

[activeco]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

I changed the title back. Now I mispelled the word hiding again. Lets see what comes next.

It wasn't needed. You're still #1 for "Hidding content from search engines", this time with correctly spelled header in the serps.
I would keep it correct and see.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by activeco

It wasn't needed. You're still #1 for "Hidding content from search engines", this time with correctly spelled header in the serps.
I would keep it correct and see.

Well at least we know now that there is no penalty involved.

[activeco]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Well at least we know now that there is no penalty involved.

Right, but I would wait at least three weeks, not doing any changes, to draw some conclusions.

[kgun]

Generally: It is too early to know the future

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by activeco

Right, but I would wait at least three weeks, not doing any changes, to draw some conclusions.

Sure man. Lets go for it.

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by kgun

Generally: It is too early to know the future

However, Days of Future Past affords a glimpse of what might be.

[full house]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Can you tell some examples?

If you do cloaking, what penalties would your site get? There is no specific example for this. I just wanna know.

thanks,

[kgun]

Originally Posted by deepsand

However, Days of Future Past affords a glimpse of what might be.

1. Participating at seminars by David F. Hendry and Clive W.J. Granger I soon learned that trendextrapolation can be compared to driving by looking in the mirror.
2. I think Robert Prechter that founded Elliott Wave International has made it the (in my personal opinion very important) task of his life to make Ralph Nelson Elliott's works like "Nature's Law - The secret of the universe" known. The Elliott fractal is used to predict financial movements. To the question:
   
   When will the credit crunch, mortgage and housing crisis (that becomes more and more global -- now also spreading to Australia) reach a bottom?
   
   An Elliottician will simply answer. It will reach the bottom when the wave pattern (The Elliott Fractal) is complete at the relevant degree. That is not a simple statement, and it may take some studies of fractal mathematics to understand that.
   
   Books:
   
   Kenneth Falconer: "Fractal Gometry - Mathematical Foundations and Applications." (Advanced level)
   
   Michael F. Barnsley: "Fractals Everywhere." (Intermediate level)
   
   Elliott's and Prechters works: (Basic level).
3. Example: Ignore the misunderstandings that have produced the present world.
4. "However, Days of Future Past affords a glimpse of what might be". Agree. "There is nothing new under the sun" aside from our communication infra structure.

Back to topic: Cloacking, AJAX and Web 2.0. Does it need a reformulation where the standard are set at: World Wide Web Consortium - Web Standards and not a private company?

[seopo]

Out of interest, in your original post it mentioned that your keyword was first to appear.... did this include HTML markup too?

[James00]

Well, I guess there are still some people practicing cloaking yet, not penalized or blacklisted by Google. I don't know what's the reason maybe Google don't noticed it.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by seopo

Out of interest, in your original post it mentioned that your keyword was first to appear.... did this include HTML markup too?

Yes. Why do you ask. Does that make any difference? Site are create in HTML and not in Text.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by James00

I don't know what's the reason maybe Google don't noticed it.

Do you think so?

[Webnauts]

Back to topic.

My intention of the cloaking technique is not to hide an site navigation or external links. Also not to hide any keywords.
It is only adding two single internal anchors, to enhance the usability of my pages for blind users. For the ones who did not follow the thread, here they are again:

<ul id="skip-link" title="Keyboard Tabbing and Screen Reader users functions">
 <li><a href="#main-content" accesskey="2">Skip to main content</a></li>
<li><a href="#helpnav" accesskey="3">Skip to local navigation</a></li>
</ul>

Eric Enge Interviews Google's Matt Cutts

Originally Posted by Eric Enge

Let's move on to hidden text. There are a lot of legitimate ways people can use hidden text, and, there are of course ways they can illegitimately use hidden text. It strikes me that many of these kinds of hidden text are hard to tell apart. You can have someone who is using a simple CSS display:none scenario, and perhaps they are stuffing keywords, but maybe they do this with a certain amount of intelligence, making it much harder to detect then the site you recently wrote about. So, tell me about how you deal with these various forms of hidden text?

Originally Posted by Matt Cutts

Sure. I don't know if you saw the blog post recently where somebody tried to layout many different ways to do hidden text, and ended up coming up with 14 different techniques. It was kind of a fun blog post, and I forwarded it to somebody and said "hey, how many do we check for"? There were at least a couple that wasn't strictly hidden text, but it was still an interesting post.
Certainly there are some cases where people do deceptive or abusive things with hidden text, and, those are the things that get our users most angry. If your web counter displays a single number, that's just a number, a single number. Probably, users aren't going to complain about that to Google, but if you have 4,000 stuffed words down at the bottom of the page that's clearly the sort of thing that if user realizes it's down at the bottom of the page, they get angry about it.
Interestingly enough they get angry about it whether it helped or not. I saw somebody do a blog post recently that had a complaint about six words of hidden text and how they showed up for the query "access panels". In fact, the hidden text didn't even include the word access panels, just a variant of that phrase.

Originally Posted by Eric Enge

I am familiar with the post.

Originally Posted by Matt Cutts

I thought it was funny that this person had gotten really offended at six words of hidden text, and complained about a query which had only one word out of the two. So, you do see a wide spectrum, where people really dislike a ton of hidden keyword stuff. They might not mind a number, but even with as little as six words, we do see complaints about that. So, our philosophy has tried to be not to find any false positives, but to try to detect stuff that would qualify as keyword stuffing, or gibberish, or stitching pages, or scraping, especially put together with hidden text.
We use a combination of algorithmic and manual things to find hidden text. I think Google is alone in notifying Webmasters about relatively small incidences of hidden text, because that is something where we'll try to drop an email to the Webmaster, and alert them in Webmaster Central. Typically, you'd get a relatively short-term penalty from Google, maybe 30 days for something like that. But, that can certainly go up over time, if you continue to leave the text on your page.

Originally Posted by Eric Enge

Right. So, a 30 days penalty in this sort of situation, is that getting removed from the index, or just de-prioritizing their rankings?

Originally Posted by Matt Cutts

Typically with hidden text, a regular person can look at it and instantly tell that it is hidden text. There are certainly great cases you could conjure up where that is not the case, but the vast majority of the time it's relatively obvious. So, for that it would typically be a removal for 30 days.
Then, if the site removes the hidden text or does a reconsideration request directly after that it could be shorter. But, if they continue to leave up that hidden text then that penalty could get longer.
We have to balance what we think is best for our users. We don't want to remove resources from our index longer than we need to it, especially if it's relatively high quality. But, at the same time we do want to have a clean index and protect the relevance of it.

Originally Posted by Eric Enge

Right. Note that Accesspanels.net has removed the hidden text and they are still ranked no. 1 in Google for the query "access panels".
I checked this a few days ago, and the hidden text had been removed. The site has a "last updated" indicator at the bottom of the page, and it was just the day before I checked.

Originally Posted by Matt Cutts

That's, we probably shouldn't get into too much detail about individual examples, but that one got our attention and is winding its way through the system.

Originally Posted by Eric Enge

Right. When reporting web spam, writing a blog post in a very popular blog and getting a lot of peoples' attention to it is fairly effective. But, also Webmaster tools allows you to do submissions there, and it gets looked at pretty quickly, doesn't it?

Originally Posted by Matt Cutts

It does. We try to be pretty careful about the submissions that we get to our spam report form. We've always been clear that the first and primary goal with those is to look at those to try to figure out how to improve our algorithmic quality. But, it is definitely the case that we look at many of those manually as well, and so you can imagine if you had a complaint about a popular site because it had hidden text, we would certainly check that out. For example, the incident we discussed just a minute ago, someone had checked it out earlier today and noticed the hidden text is already gone.
We probably won't bother to put a postmortem penalty on that one, but, it's definitely the case that we try to keep an open mind and look at spam reports, and reports across the web not just on big blogs, but also on small blogs.
We try to be pretty responsive and adapt relatively well. That particular incident was interesting, but I don't think that the text involved was actually affecting that query since it was different words.

Originally Posted by Eric Enge

Right. Are there hidden text scenarios that are harder for you to discern whether or not they are spam versus something like showing just part of a site's terms and conditions on display, or dynamic menu structures? Are there any scenarios where it's really hard for you tell whether it is spam or not?

Originally Posted by Matt Cutts

I think Google handles the vast majority of idioms like dynamic menus and things like that very well. In almost all of these cases you can construct interesting examples of hidden text. Hidden text, like many techniques, is on a spectrum. The vast majority of the time, you can look and you can instantly tell that it is malicious, or it's a huge amount of text, or it's not designed for the user. Typically we focus our efforts on the most important things that we consider to be a high priority. The keyword stuffed pages with a lot of hidden text, we definitely give more attention.

Originally Posted by Eric Enge

Right.

Originally Posted by Matt Cutts

So, we do view a lot of different spam or quality techniques as being on a spectrum. And, the best advice that I can give to your readers is probably to ask a friend to look at their site, it's easy to do a Ctrl+A, it's easy to check things with cascading style sheets off, and stick to the more common idioms, the best practices that lots of sites do rather than trying to do an extremely weird thing that could be misinterpreted even by a regular person as being spamming.

Source: Matt Cutts Interviewed by Eric Enge on September 24, 2007

Do you still believe that Google would penalize me only because I added such an accessible and usable function? If that will be the case, then GOOGLE SUCKS BIG TIME! But still I have a hard time to believe that they do so.

What do you think now?

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by seopo

2. There was talk of noindex on sections of content such as robots-exclusion-brainstorming - Microformats or <div rel="noindex", doubt anything is in place yet (anyone tested?) but may be in the next year?

As you see I tested and it doesn't work:
Hiding content from search engines

[kgun]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Back to topic.
My intention of the cloaking technique is not to hide an site navigation or external links. Also not to hide any keywords.
It is only adding two single internal anchors, to enhance the usability of my pages for blind users. For the ones who did not follow the thread, here they are again:

<ul id="skip-link" title="Keyboard Tabbing and Screen Reader users functions">
 <li><a href="#main-content" accesskey="2">Skip to main content</a></li>
<li><a href="#helpnav" accesskey="3">Skip to local navigation</a></li>
</ul>

I think that (see my above posts) is the way to do it.

I repeat the above link: WebAIM: CSS in Action: Invisible Content Just for Screen Reader Users

The same technique has been a part of Adobe (Former Macromedia) Dreamweaver templates at least since 2004.

<div class="skipLinks">skip to: 
 <a href="#content">page content</a> | 
 <a href="pageNav">links on this page</a> | 
 <a href="#globalNav">site navigation</a> | 
 <a href="#siteInfo">footer (site information)</a> 
</div>

That template also had

 <div id="advert">  Advertisement here. </div>

that could have made life easier (regarding rel="nofollow" and link selling / buying) for webmasters if it had been part of the W3C or Google standard / guidelines.

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Do you still believe that Google would penalize me only because I added such an accessible and usable function?

Hopefully not.

One example:
Hiding an email address on an image. Is that regarded as cloacking?

Related threads where cloacking is discussed:
Affiliate link hijacking.

AJAX and SEO.

Advice:
Send a proposal to W3C with a copy to GYM regarding acessibility and cloacking.

[Webnauts]

Kjell,

I know all those practices about not hiding links from screenreaders published at Webaim and elsewhere. Using overflow:hidden or display:none are more dangerous that the practice I wanted to implement.

The other thread you mention does not tell me anything either.

I do need any links to other threads or articles. I need a yes or no. Thats all.

About contacting W3C I certainly will do. I am subscribed on the web contact accessibility group mailing list since 8 years now. I will drop a note there. Thanks for the tip.

[Webnauts]

Oh. You still can see my CSS I use for the skip links:

#skip-link {width:0;height:0;list-style-type:none;}
#skip-link li {width:28em;margin:0;padding:0;text-indent:0;}
#skip-link a, #skip-link a:link {display:inline-block;position:absolute;top:-556px;background:#fafafa;color:#000;cursor:help;margin:0;padding:4px 4px;line-height:1.0em;font-weight:bold; text-decoration: underline;z-index:99;}
#skip-link a:visited {top:-556px; background:#fafafa;color:#fff;cursor:help;text-decoration: underline;}
#skip-link a:active{top:4px;left:4px;background:#2F4E6F;color:#fafafa;cursor:help;text-decoration:underline;}
#skip-link a:focus {top:4px;left:4px;background:#2F4E6F;color:#fafafa;cursor:help;text-decoration:underline;}

[kgun]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Kjell,
I do need any links to other threads or articles. I need a yes or no. Thats all.

I can not give that yes or no, since I am not working for Google. Note:

1. Acessibility, usability, XML and Web 2.0 aspects may be ahead of SE software developement.
2. I don't know of a SE Company adapting to new technologies faster than Google.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by kgun

1. I don't know of a SE Company adapting to new technologies faster than Google.

But I hope you know that there is an SEO company that does and that is mine.

Read my next post what I came up with.

[Webnauts]

OK everybody. I came up with another idea, which one of my team members made possible.

You all remember that I said that my rankings were hurt since I stopped hiding the skip links which were the first text ( text links) on my pages and looked like that:

Code position for human visitors (in red & bold):

<body id="www-seoworkers-com">
<ul id="skip-link" title="Keyboard Tabbing and Screen Reader users functions">
<li><a href="#main-content" accesskey="2">Skip to main content</a></li>
<li><a href="#sub-nav" accesskey="3">Skip to local navigation</a></li>
</ul>
<div id="container">
<div id="siteimg">
<div id="hdr">
<div id="logo"><a href="/" title="SEO Workers - The Cutting Edge in SEO." accesskey="1"><img src="/images/seoworkerslogo.jpg" alt="SEO Workers - The Cutting Edge in SEO." width="256" height="90" /></a></div>
</div>

<h1>Leading Organic Search Engine Optimization Experts</h1>
</div>

The first text the SE have been seeing was:

• Skip to main content
• Skip to local navigation

And we did not want that. We wanted the SE to see first our logo alt attribute and our <h1> tag.

Now we came up with solution not to hide links or text from the SE, but to place the skip links for them after our <h1> tags like this:

Code position for bots (in red & bold):

<body id="www-seoworkers-com"><div id="container">
<div id="siteimg">
<div id="hdr">
<div id="logo"><a href="/" title="SEO Workers - The Cutting Edge in SEO." accesskey="1"><img src="/images/seoworkerslogo.jpg" alt="SEO Workers - The Cutting Edge in SEO." width="256" height="90" /></a></div>
</div>

<h1>Leading Organic Search Engine Optimization Experts</h1>
<ul id="skip-link" title="Keyboard Tabbing and Screen Reader users functions">
<li><a href="#main-content" accesskey="2">Skip to main content</a></li>
<li><a href="#sub-nav" accesskey="3">Skip to local navigation</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

No CSS, Flash, Ajax or similar techniques. Pure server side! Just PHP!

So there is no hidden text. Would this be a solution to make everyone happy?

SEOs of WebProWorld unite!

[deepsand]

That post seems to have really fried the WPW Alert e-mail sub-system. I got:

• Skip to main content
• Skip to local navigation

Leading Organic Search Engine Optimization Experts


--------- The first text the SE have been seeing was: * *Skip to main content* * *Skip to local navigation* So did not want that. We wanted the SE to see first our logo alt attribute and our tag. Now we came up with solution not to hide links or text from the SE, but to place the skip links after the <H1>tag like this: *Code position for bots:* Code: ---------

<H1>Leading Organic Search Engine Optimization Experts

• Skip to main content
• Skip to local navigation

--------- So there is no hidden text. Would this be a solution to make everyone happy? *************** There may also be other replies, but you will not receive any more notifications until you visit the forum again. All the best, WebProWorld ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Unsubscription information: To unsubscribe from this thread, please visit this page: http://www.webproworld.com/subscript...e6977b93a6c94e To unsubscribe from ALL threads, please visit this page: http://www.webproworld.com/subscript...n&folderid=all


</H1></H1>

[Webnauts]

What the hell is that?

OFF TOPIC: Just in case someone have forgotten that it's my birthday today: http://www.webproworld.com/webprowor...-britsios.html

[deepsand]

That is what the e-mail advising me of your prior post to this thread looks like! Even Adobe choked on trying to convert it to a PDF file so that I could reproduce it here.

Did you get your Birthday e-mail from WPW?

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by deepsand

Did you get your Birthday e-mail from WPW?

No. Do you think I will receive one?

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

No. Do you think I will receive one?

I got an auto-generated one on mine.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by deepsand

I got an auto-generated one on mine.

Hey just arrived!!!!

Hello Webnauts,

We at WebProWorld would like to wish you a happy birthday today!

Well, looks like I do not deserve anything better than that. Anyway...

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Hey just arrived!!!!



Well, looks like I do not deserve anything better than that. Anyway...

Well, then, if you like, I can forward to you the screwy e-mail that your post triggered, so that you'll have an individualized keepsake.

[seopo]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

As you see I tested and it doesn't work:
Hiding content from search engines

Actualy, I tested it today and it appears to have worked?!

Have you changed the source since indexing?

[kgun]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

But I hope you know that there is an SEO company that does and that is mine.

Read my next post what I came up with.

Have you started using OpenID on your SEO forums?

If not you can get one here: Vidoop.com - Home

Example: Simon Willison’s Weblog (See upper left corner. Clever man writing books for SitePoint.)

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by seopo

Actualy, I tested it today and it appears to have worked?!

Have you changed the source since indexing?

To be honest I do not remember. Lets wait until Google will visit the page again.

[seopo]

Be interesting to see.... been told it's not strict valid though. rel is only to <a> so that may have other implications. Not that the SE care though

[Webnauts]

I think that the thread is going fully off-topic.

So, can someone tell me what you think about my post/solution above Google and Cloaking

Thanks.

[kgun]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

I think that the thread is going fully off-topic.

So, can someone tell me what you think about my post/solution above Google and Cloaking

Thanks.

Originally Posted by Webnauts

No CSS, Flash, Ajax or similar techniques. Pure server side! Just PHP!

So there is no hidden text. Would this be a solution to make everyone happy?

SEOs of WebProWorld unite!

Pure server side. That is not the problem.

The problem may be the (X)HT(ML) markup and / or styling that is produced by server scripting.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by kgun

The problem may be the (X)HT(ML) markup and / or styling that is produced by server scripting.

Hey brother, I hope you are kidding. That can only happen if someone cannot code valid XHTML.

[kgun]

No, cloaking is more than hidden text. John, I don't work for Google.

[Orion]

cloaking usually refers to hiding code so that there's no view source, when you do that some solutions hide the code from the search bots too.. thus showing the text in the browser to the viewer but the search bots see nothing...

I have a couple of clients that purchased and use software to do that for a few pages in their sites for security reasons, really helps with the spambots too.... I did learn that you have to be very careful which ones you use though, the majority now seem to be alright for the search bots none of their pages or sites are penalized etc. most of them are set up not to be indexed in the engines anyway (robot.txt) and it's done alright.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by kgun

No, cloaking is more than hidden text. John, I don't work for Google.

Quality guidelines - basic principles

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

Source: Webmaster Guidelines - Webmaster Help Center

[kgun]

John I know that.

Originally Posted by Orion

cloaking usually refers to hiding code so that there's no view source, when you do that some solutions hide the code from the search bots too.. thus showing the text in the browser to the viewer but the search bots see nothing...

Different from hiding text?

Is an extranet that is only visible to human beings / customers regarded as cloaking?

[Orion]

ExtraNets, the only one that I assisted with just blocked the bots with the robot.txt file for the pages / sections we didn't want indexed.