Why would you cloak here?

[Moraco]

>I cloak just about every page that goes to Google for one reason or another...even parts of this site

Brett, why would you cloak here?

[Air]

Well until Brett arrives with the definitive answer I'll guess that it's because there are parts of this site that Brett would like to remain private, or part that would attract the "wrong" kind of traffic and therefore are best kept away from the pervasive Google spider.

[Brett_Tabke]

Back up one page to the main forum page [webmasterworld.com]. Scroll down to the "show" drop down and select "all". See all those posts? That is the one way to get those posts to show up. The other is from a cookie that is set when you use that option.

There is no other way that GoogleBot would find all the real urls on the site without cloaking. So, that page is cloaked and delivered in full ("all" as default for it on that drop down) when GB comes calling. There are also some tweaks with the active page to do the same.

There are also coming changes to the post format for Googlebot to optimize the content that is here. Subtle things that wont detract from the look of the page, but optimize it for cache viewing and indexing. Nothing nefarious, just subtle.

There is also cloaking on every cgi url to remove the session id. The main point of the session ID's is to overcome the AOL cache without going to a full blown cloak and custom header deliver to AOL that includes no cache tags. I really don't think we need GoogleBot turning 4k pages into 4k times infinity pages (ultimately there is a true Googol of potential urls here).

I also cloak profiles from time to time to thwart people signing up, and then getting their url indexed on Google for the page rank value.

So, basically protecting the site and making it indexable by da bot.

[Xoc]

All of these look like legitimate uses for cloaking. They enhance the value of Google as a search engine, not detract from it. If Google really thinks this is spam they need to rethink their policies.