To cloak

a few questions before doing so

[Istvan]

At this moment I am digging myself in before starting with the actual cloaking. I have a few questions sofar..

Situation: In a search engine result, for example google, when I done a search for the keyword "widgets".

1. Let's say in those results is one site which is cloaking, does the url of the "cloak site", is the url which the spider got served by the cloaking script and is that cloaked url which the visitor lands at, when clicking on a site in the SERP?

2. Plus if you see that there is a nocache tag or the cache function shows a different page then the url in the SERP, does that classify a cloaking site?

3. The other day I was searching in Google for "blue widgets". In the SERP, I found a site which got those keywords in the url like www.widgets.com/blue-widgets.htm. Now if I click on the url in the SERPS and I go to the link blue-widgets.htm, that blue-widgets.htm is nowhere to be seen except in the Address Bar, there are many links like widgets1.htm, widgets2.htm and widgets.htm, but not a link to blue-widgets.htm. Also if I go looking at www.widgets.com/index.htm , there is nowhere a link to www.widgets.com/blue-widgets.htm ... is this also a way of cloaking?

4. When talking about cloaking software/scripts, which scripts are good/best, sofar I found IP-delivery.com which seems a nice product, any other input?

Istvan

[johnser]

Hi Istvan

1 - The product you mentioned above displays a page like domain.com/widgets.html in the SERPs. This page contains the redirect script which directs depending on IP/UA to 1 of 2 pages:

Google sees domain.com/cloaked/widgets_google.html
Users see domain.com/human/widgets_human.html

2 - Usually but not definitely.
Search Google for "webmasterworld" - I think its used on this site to prevent the SEs caching stale content.

3 - Possibly, a number of things could be going on.
The page might have been changed since it was crawled
or.. it might be a cloaked page.

Read Air's cloaking primer [webmasterworld.com]
Theres a couple of giveaways such as page size displayed compared to actual page size, whether the descriptions match etc etc.

4 - IP Del is ok. Theres a few other decent ones too. You'll find a decent list here [dmoz.org] of varying prices. The key thing is to maintain an up-to-date IP list.

Good luck
John

[SlowMove]

I'm hearing different things about cloaking. What are the chances of getting caught?

[johnser]

Spend a week reading here and you'll be ok :)
Know the risks though & decide whether they're worth taking.

[DaveN]

slowmove, the chances of getting caught a really down to how you cloak and keep your IP addresses updated

DaveN

[edited by: DaveN at 10:16 pm (utc) on June 8, 2003]

[SlowMove]

What's the best way to make sure IP addresses are always updated?

[DaveN]

buy the information from a Professional Outfit

Dave

This is a not a open question so that everyone can start dropping URL's if you have any suggestions for SlowMove sticky him

Dave

[johnser]

Several of the products linked to in my post above keep you updated with IPs. Expect to pay for good quality info.
J

[SlowMove]

thanks for the help.