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Can someone please recommend a good page to read up on this? Or perhaps someone could explain here? Thanks for your help.
Questions that I'd particularly like answered are:
- What is cloaking?
- Are there different types of cloaking?
- Why would someone want to cloak and not get revealed in the Google cache?
- What is meant by good & bad cloaking?
Thx,
May
Can someone please recommend a good page to read up on this? Or perhaps someone could explain here? Thanks for your help.
- What is cloaking?
Cloaking is simply serving a webpage to a search engine spider that is different than what a human sees.
- Are there different types of cloaking?
There are two basic types:
Agent Delivery (Serving content based on user-agent)
IP Delivery (Serving content based on the IP address)
Most current cloaking systems use a combination of the two.
- Why would someone want to cloak and not get revealed in the Google cache?
Some cloakers use the noarchive tag to prevent the content from being seen in the cache. Some cloakers do not prevent caching.
The ones that allow their cloaked pages to be cached feel that that noarchive tag is a red flag and that the cloaked content will have a longer shelf-life if it isn't hidden. (Google hasn't always been real quick in responding to spam reports)
- What is meant by good & bad cloaking?
It depends on who you ask, (there are some that feel the term "good cloaking" is an oxymoron)but good cloaking usually refers to using some type of IP detection system to solve a technical problem. An example would be detecting spider IP's so you could serve them pages without session ID's or links that may cause them to get caught in a loop.
/claus
Why would any company want to prevent their site being cached in Google?
Thx,
May
