Cloaking based on competitor's ID

old topic but I want to know how SE's feel

[peter sampers]

I have recently noticed that my competitor is crawling certain pages on my site, apparently for prices. My question is whether or not I can change this information specifically for their IP address. Would this be against any of the SE's TOS?

[volatilegx]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld :)

> Would this be against any of the SE's TOS?

No, I can't see why it would be. How would they ever find out even if it was?

[peter sampers]

I didn't see a way that they could (especially since the price changes will be shown only to my competitor's ip) but some of the higher-ups wanted to make sure I was covering all of our bases before doing this (apparently our site was almost delisted a few years back so we are now very careful). Thanks for the response!

[volatilegx]

I love being sneaky like this. Awhile back I was getting a lot of fraudulent purchase attempts from a certain IP address. The cards were being declined, but of course my merchant bank was still charging me for each attempt. So, I modified my cart to make it so any credit card number entered from that IP address would get a declined message without checking my bank. The crook just thinks he has a lot of bad credit cards, now. Maybe it will keep him from running up fraudulent charges on the charges at other sites, too :)

Anyway, I think solutions like this are better than simply banning an IP address, because it would be so easy for that person to surf in through a proxy.

[trillianjedi]

I love being sneaky like this.

Yes, this kind of thing is downright beautiful when it works ;)

Just ensure that you only cloak for their IP ranges, nothing else. No-one else will know.

The probability is it will be discovered at some point - bear that in mind and think through any potential repercussions.

TJ

[peter sampers]

Well, all I can see for repercussions is that they move their crawler to a different ip which is no big deal. I just don't want to completely ban it because they will know that I am on to them. If I just change prices, they get bad info and maybe they raise their prices a little to "compete" with my new rates. I can handle the competitor, just wanted to check on the SE repercussions. Thanks for the help!