When Google's Not Looking

Am I A Bad Person For Asking This?

[inuwolf]

Since it's possible to identify a bot based on its IP and, in many server-side languages, it's possible to change a page's content based on the viewer's IP, can sites use simple PHP tricks, for instance, to hide their blackhat tricks from Googlebot?

OK, people probably already do this. If they do, how do Google and other search engines get around it?

This occurred to me the first time the other day when a Google search led me to a cached page of WW and at the top it said "Welcome Guest from blah blah blah." Although I already knew it, it never really occurred to me that Googlebot and all spiders are just guests that can be fooled like any other.

Is it illegal to change the display of page contents to bots, even if it isn't necessarily tricky?

[volatilegx]

It's called cloaking.

Am I A Bad Person For Asking This?

Yes, you are a very naughty boy. ;)

Is it illegal to change the display of page contents to bots, even if it isn't necessarily tricky?

It's legal. It's against Google's guidelines, though.

[inuwolf]

Well it's good there's a word for it. (I just did a search for it and WW's Cloaking forum was Google's first result :) ). Is cloaking common? How does Google check for it?

I also have a semi-related question that I should probably ask in the cloaking forum but I'll ask it now while I'm here. The index of my site has many many links on it, but all of them are to pages on my own site. I know loads of offsite links are bad, but do you think these (there are over a hundred), will hurt my Pagerank? If so, would it be a bad idea cloaking them (just displaying the anchor text but hiding the "href" from Googlebot)?

I guess I'm just trying to get a feel for the legitimacy of cloaking. What do you guys think about it?

[volatilegx]

I don't think links pointing to the same domain affect pagerank.

I believe that Google's efforts to detect cloaking involve comparing what is indexed to what users of their toolbar and/or accelerator are seeing.

Cloaking is very common among a certain set of SEO folks. I speak as an authority on the subject, being the author of a commercial cloaking software package.

In my opinion, cloaking should always be done on a "throw-away" domain. It can be dangerous to your search engine rankings, and you want to avoid any risks to your primary website(s).