SevenCubed - 2:28 pm on Sep 24, 2012 (gmt 0)

I was reading in another thread about people having problems when using Piwik. My first thought that came to mind was to put the Piwik script in a div wrapped in php and sniff UA to hide it from googlebot. I know that's considered cloaking, and to some extent it might be considered blackhat but it seems very warranted. They are beginning to plunge too deep into wells and are now stirring up debris that settles to the bottom and making non-existing connections to data that can lead to grief for webmasters. As many point out here due to google's refusal to play by their own rules more people are going to begin using alternate methods to prevent their sites from sinking into oblivion. I have no doubt there are legitimate uses of blackhat techniques as long as they are not intended to manipulate SERPs but applied to protect one's own site from further harm caused by google's stupidity.

As a side note I'm wondering if messing with Piwik in this manner is an underhanded way of trying to eliminate Piwik, the competitor of GA. If the non-existing linking comes into play on a massive scale where it begins affecting ranking a webmaster might be inclined to ditch Piwik and go back to GA...just my humble opinion of course :)