why you should not use a unique id in a cloaked page

[jeremy goodrich]

I was just surfing around :) and as I know of a few 'cloaking ids' in some various cloaked pages, I thought I would do a test.

No, I'm not going to give away the ID of the pages, just the numbers for results:

Alltheweb 7,475 pages with 'uniqe id' all cloaked

Ink 1 page, however, the page was a 'keyword ranking report' for a media company, showing google search results pages :) very amusing, I must say.

Google 1,580

Northernlight (though they are ending this) 15,157

Directhit - doesn't produce a 'total matches found figure' but there are a few pages worth :)

Altavista 33 results found

Wisenut 25 documents found

Teoma - 0 results found (though as we know, they haven't spidered with a teoma spider since Sept.)

Very, very interesting info...now I am wondering, why would anybody do this with their pages? Is there some advantage to this I can't come up with?

[Air]

>..now I am wondering, why would anybody do this with their pages?

Can't think of a reason to do with ranking, but many like to put a unique identifier on their pages to make it easier to find which have been indexed, or when an update has taken place.

As you've shown though, it does carry some hazards.

[tkd1939]

Hi, ? from a new guy.
What is a unique identifier? Doesn't sound like it should be used whatever it is.

[Air]

Hello tkd1939, welcome to the forums at wmw.

A unique identifier is anything included in a page that is unlikely to exist on other pages, perhaps some text in an "alt=" tag, or in a keywords tag, something you can later search for and find all of your pages indexed, sometimes people do it to have a better chance of identifying their code if they suspect a page has been page jacked.

For example if you added "tkd1939" to some part of your web page code, and also added it on every page you produce, it would be easy to find your pages by searching for "tkd1939" at most search engines.