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I've been reading up on cloaking lately, and something striked me as very odd. Lets say you successful created a cloaked page and got it indexed on Google. It shows one page for regular users and another page for Googlebot. Lets also assume you don't want others to know that you are cloaking. My question is doesnt the cached page show it as the cloaked page (like the one meant for googlebot)? Can somebody simply go to the cached page and look at it? I can't see the possiblity that you provide the page meant for the regular user on the cached page. Anybody got some insight on this problem.
Also, theres never any links of real world examples of cloaking here. I've love to see one if anybody knows of any site. Thanks.
Sam =)
You can opt out of the caching system - but that can be flagged as a potential spam problem (Google class cloaking as spam) and you will be banned faster than Michael Schumacher's weekend car if you are cloaking (it is VERY easy to spot cloaking for Google, but takes up lots of bandwidth unless they can narrow down the high potentials).
I am sure ther are cloakers out there reading this post with a big smaile on their face.
Personally I have never used cloaking, however have talked to a couple in my life.
1 of them is so cloaked, that I dont even know whether the dude actually exists :)
sure everything is possible, however doubt anyone is spilling the beans.
Shak
Case of weighing risk against reward. If you make $1000 a day for 4mts or a year, is it worth the time spent building it?
If you earn nothing or very little, who cares anyway? ;)
You'll get caught if you're in a competitive area almost for sure but, WHEN is the important question...
Nick
I use ASP in order to direct the user to a different page dependent on the url they typed...
ie I have *.url.com subdomains that are all mapped to the same virtual server. Each property in my database has a subdomain associated to it. So when the user hits the url it does a lookup on the subdomain, compares it against the database and redirects to the relevent property
Would this be considered as Cloaking, spamming or any other black mark as far as the search engine is concerend?
Thanks
What does the serach engine determine as unacceptable cloaking?
Can anyone give e some feedback on what i am doing (see post above) and whether you think google and other engines would think this to be unacceptable
I don't think what you describe can be called cloaking at all, since a different URL must be called to access the different content.
Cloaking is when different content is served depending on the identity of the requestor.
Whether or not what you are doing might be penalized depends on exactly how you do it. If it is transparent to the search engines (for example, no redirect codes are sent, the URL doesn't change, etc.) then you probably won't be penalized.
[edited by: volatilegx at 6:00 pm (utc) on Mar. 21, 2003]
