Cloaking and MySQL

Is it possible to use both?

[Quazar]

Hey everyone! Wondered if someone might have a solution to a problem I am facing. I would like to build a website utilizing MySQL for the product pages. I also would like to cloak the site. I currently have not found a cloaking script that will do that. Is this possible?

[volatilegx]

Hi Quazar and welcome to WMW :)

Sure it's possible to do both. You can show optimized text to the bots and forward the humans to your MySQL generated pages. With a lot of cloaking programs, you can grab the human versions using a standard URL, which means you can do the URL encoding if necessary, by which I mean the information after the "?" mark in the URL.

I don't want to mention any specific product names here (doing so would break forum rules, I believe), but if you stickymail me I can give you some ideas.

[Friday]

What I do in situations like this is to capture the product page(s) as html and call a php function with known SE IPs in an array.

Show the spiders the html product page(s) while visitors see your product index page(s).

As double protection, I call the function from the cloaked page with a "!". That is: If this is NOT a spider, don't let them see this cloaked page but send them to the actual product index.

The product index page says the opposite: If this is a spider send them to the "cloaked" html page so they can see what we have to offer.