What else can you do with cloaking?

[Air]

Ok, so most everyone knows by now that cloaking is primarily used to display one page to spiders and a different page to visitors. Has anyone applied the concept of cloaking to do other useful things (or even silly things) apart from it's intended use?

I've used it to thwart e-mail harvesters, and even to target AOL users at one time, then there was the time I drove my nephew crazy because he was getting a different page from everyone else ....

Anyone else put it to some creative use?

[robrob]

Interesting question. I have heard that sites like Yahoo use a form of cloaking to give visitors from foreign countries different pages depending on where they are. I imagine it could also be used to conceal a site from all but certain IP numbers. Kind of like a password, only transparent. I like your practical joke idea.

[Brett_Tabke]

Feeding Google more advertising than I do users so that if it is viewed out of the Google "cache" (term used loosely) atleast I get something out of it.

[cirelle]

>> Feeding Google more advertising than I do users so that

>> if it is viewed out of the Google "cache" (term used

>> loosely) atleast I get something out of it.

That's a classy idea! Never thought of that myself (and probably wouldn't have)

c

[Air]

>Feeding Google more advertising ...

Cool idea, and totally within bounds of the advertiser too. Slick!

[Damian]

Use of virtual includes (ssi) which kick in only for spiders , sort of 'partial' cloaking.

[Xoc]

I just did the first bit of cloaking on my site. But it is sort of anti-cloaking, really. I'm trying to get the search engines to drop some listings for stuff that I moved to its own domain. I currently have a 404 handler to redirects (via a 301 error) requests for documents on the old to the same document on the new domain. Unfortunately, the search engines seem to feel that that makes the old link still viable, and leave it in the search listings. I would have thought that a 301 Permanently Moved would get them to drop the old listing, but apparently not. I then tried adding those pages to the robots.txt, but that hasn't seemed to work either.

So I added to the 404 handler additional code so that if it comes from the IP address of a known spider, it doesn't forward...it just gives the 404 error. So a user following a link to the old domain will wind up at the same page on the new domain, but a search engine spider will see a 404 error and hopefully eventually drop the page.

[FreeBee]

Use it as a supplementary research tool…..

When you’re planning a new site in a new market segment and haven't the foggiest idea on surfing patterns and in particular what keywords are really used - try cloaking!

Last year we took a large amount of “obviously relevant” content and randomised it. Then selected a group of hopefully relevant keywords and phrases and created a much larger group of pages on an independent standalone domain. Then fed the lot to some deep crawl spiders, gathered a few months worth of referral data, then shutdown and analysed.

We landed up with a small and concentrated sample of very relevant keywords and a ton of garbage that has since been thrown away. Importantly, we’ve now built a new site on the originally intended domain that (we believe) delivers appropriate content to users based on their queries.

(The crazy thing is that we’ve since had to spend more time on optimisation to refine for different algos and will probably end up cloaking to keep our work working for us and not our competitors...)

[ggrot]

Thats a neat idea...showing different content based on the referring page of the visitor. The closest I've ever seen this happen before was where the search box on the main page of a site reflected the search that I had typed in on the engine. Truthfully, I thought it was a great touch. Im sure this can be applied in other ways.