Factors when considering cloaking?

Do's and Don'ts

[jayz]

I'm considering cloaking and have read into many of the issues involved.

Is it worth purchasing known ip search engine addresses and subsequent updates or are the free listings adaquete?

Has anyone been recently burned by just detecting for the user agent?

Is this still a bad idea to just detect the user agent or should you also detect for the IP address?

[drbill]

Hi Jayz, Welcome to WmW.

UserAgent is NOT the way to go. Stick with IP based cloaking.

I think that if you have the IP you really don't need the agent to cloak with.

The free ip lists out there are pretty complete. I used them as a base and then build it up for yourself.

[jayz]

Should you use User-Agent to catch new ips?

Say googlebot uses a new IP that you don't have yet. Would it be smart to use the user-agent to catch those?

Any other issues I should think about?

[drbill]

>Should you use User-Agent to catch new ips?

yes don't get me wrong use it to catch the new ips BUT I would not do that with a script. I would use Logs (Somesort of raw log reader) and do it by hand. I prefer doing it by hand as an agent can be spoofed and they you are giving away all your hard work to someone that spoofed your script.

I like to be able to have a refering URL in my log script that allows me to follow up with anything that does not have one. I have yet to see a referering url from any of the major spiders.

One last thing. Always to a Trace Route on any new IP so you can see if you are being spoofed.