Cloaking



Matt Cutts talks about cloaking. Learn more in our Help Center: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355

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28 thoughts on “Cloaking”

  1. You are wrong, there is a white hat cloaking and it is very important.
    For example. If I hide admin panel from evil google bot, so nobody knew my directory structure and the file names (except me) then my website is more secure from attacks.

  2. What about the Accept-Language header? Not everyone in a given country necessarily speak's that countries language very well. Tourists are a good example. IP address is a decent backup if there is no Accept-Language header or it contains no available languages.

  3. What if I send you a bit different version just to make it easier to parse? I'm not gonna put different text, images, links. How to promote a website the best way? I'm not gonna trick your bot to put my website higher.

  4. Hello sir,
    You did not explain one particular thing: What if our website is purely ajax based with no graceful degradation, and when we detect a Googlebot we serve it an HTML page which is equivalent to what the a user would see after the ajax calls have loaded his page?

    Specifically, do things like "Seoserver" fall into the "Cloaking" category?

    Seoserver link: https://github.com/thomasdavis/seoserver

    "Seo Server is a command line tool that runs a server that allows GoogleBot(and any other crawlers) to crawl your heavily Javascript built websites. Seo Server runs PhantomJs(headless webkit browser) which renders the page fully and returns the fully executed code to GoogleBot."

  5. But what about Cloaking Affiliate Links ??
    If user lands on a specific page he was finding for and he likes the product OR service on that particular page and then clicking on the link on that page the user lands on the other page with relavent content and make a purchase.

    If any one can answer it ?? Please help.

  6. This doesn;t pertain to Google,but I find annoying that Canada who spells like the U.K.does not have an option in which it appears your from the U.K. not Canada,or the other choice is to appear like an American.Either way Canadians appear to be from somewhere else and the equivalent of Google Bot is given false info.

  7. Why no mention of multivariate & A/B testing? Based on the definition of "cloaking" above, then any testing program like "Adobe Test & Target" will be considered cloaking, as they intentionally exclude Google from their tests.

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