Cloaking Security Issues

[rpking]

I am considering cloaking on a well established site that seriously under performs in the rankings. Due to the dynamic nature of the site, generally only the splash page (which sadly has to be graphically intensive) gets listed.

I'm pretty sure that I've got a good grasp of cloaking, but what I'd like to know is what security precautions should I use if I start using CGI through SSI? Any breach that allows access to clients info is a complete no-no.

Although I'm well up on basic SEO, I'm a newcomer to cloaking, so I reckon I really struck gold when I found this forum.

[Air]

Welcome to the WmW forums rpking,

Security issues with SSI invariably have to do with the scripts or programs being called. The most notable are those that call for user input. This is one reason why some web hosting providers disable the "exec" function of SSI. In other words the webmaster that installs insecure scripts is the biggest threat when using SSI.

But since cloaking scripts sit quietly in the background and do not have any user input required they pose little threat, the security consideration is around having your pages not viewed by competitors, if only because you don't want them to discover you are cloaking.

HTH

[rpking]

Cheers for the reply Air. I'd kind of guessed that there was minimal risk with cloaking, as the whole point of it is that nobody knows it's there.

Still it good to get reassurance before diving in headfirst ;)

I'm planning to begin with a stripped down version that just monitors the spiders, to give the system a bit of a test (it's all been written from scratch), so hopefully I can soon contribute to the spider hunting.

[Air]

Great, that will help, more eyes on spiders the better.

A nice idea when dealing with a newly developed script is to not only log the spiders but in conjuction to log what the script would have served up in each case. A good way to do a dry run so to speak.

cheers.