Unbelievabale how well Search Engines take cloaking!

[deanril]

I was amazed to find this.

[directory.google.com...]

And when I did a search on google, my god tons of pages.

I can see cloaking as good when you are trying to conceal your data, but not when you serve content to a spider and different content to a visitor.

Thats all Im going to say about that, I was just amazed how google actually has a whole directy devoted to Cloaking, yet "Supposively" they dont like it. This actually tells me they do like it.

Its not a fair world! <<< lol!

[gsx]

That directory listing is not Google's own, but that of DMOZ. Probably would be very easy for them to remove it though...

Google do not like cloaking, but some engines do not mind it (such as Inktomi) as long as the cloaking is not spam.

[mil2k]

Probably would be very easy for them to remove it though...

But they don't which is good imho bcoz of the democratic nature of web. Make your own informed decision is the real meaning.

This actually tells me they do like it.

I wouldn't assume that of google. Others may allow Trusted feed etc but google is very strict about cloaking. :)

[edited by: mil2k at 9:11 am (utc) on June 24, 2003]

[heini]

Seeing that the search engines all cloak themselves I don't see much of a problem at all.

[deanril]

I was looking into to cloaking because my competitor cloaks, but all I see is pages with titles for key phrases ect. The software he uses made all these for him, but I can make the real pages almost as easilly, and rank even better.

So Ill do that, even though google prolly could care less I still wont do it out of fear of my site disapearing one day, and its just not right.

carma..

[deanril]

After a little thought, the Search Engines do infact Fully support Cloaking, without a doubt.

Of course the way cloaking works is to serve the spider a different page then the human. This is accomplished by knowing what IP address the Spider is coming from.

Now, has anybody here ever spoofed an IP address? It fairly simple, if the Search engines wanted to catch the Cloakers all they would have to do is Spoof their IP randomly, nobody could track it, therefor eliminating most Cloaking.

They dont do this........

[mil2k]

Now, has anybody here ever spoofed an IP address? It fairly simple, if the Search engines wanted to catch the Cloakers all they would have to do is Spoof their IP randomly, nobody could track it, therefor eliminating most Cloaking.

I would disagree simply bcoz ppl with lot more knowlegde than me think it's not that easy to spoof an ip Address.

They dont do this........

I think they do. And yes they do ban. Talked with a few cloakers who have got their Sites banned :)

[volatilegx]

I think deanril means spidering from a previously unknown ip address using a non-spider user agent string.

[bird]

Now, has anybody here ever spoofed an IP address? It fairly simple

If you just want to send a packet to the target host without revealing your location, then that's correct. If you also want to receive data (eg. a web page) back from that host, then it becomes impossible by principle. Where would the target host send the reply?

So that's the real reason why the SEs don't use IP spoofing in their cloak busting activities... ;)

[deanril]

Ok, then why do they have the same IP every single time?

Google with its 10,000 computers could have more then 2 IP addresses wouldnt you think, Myself I have access to 3 IP addresses, and I dont have 10,000 computers.

There is no excuse, they dont have to use the same IP all the time for their, spiders, if you want to get all technical about it, they infact support cloaking.

I have the answer for google, spen $15 a month and sign up for a new Internet Service provider once or twice a month and get new IP's, surely they can afford $30.

The poiint is they practicly anounce it to te world, we are coming in on this IP address, get your cloaking software up to date, so we can get your cloaked pages in our index. You cant dispute this

[TheWebographer]

What is "Supposively"?

[DaveAtIFG]

Hey Guys, I'm gonna point at TOS item 4 [webmasterworld.com] and ask ya'll to keep it civil.

IMHO, deanril is posting with a pugnacious attitude, that's not good. But discussing poor language skills or typos is way off topic and unproductive.

If it continues it will degrade and simply get the entire thread deleted and we all loose out... CHILL! :)

[deanril]

No problem, Supposively is they Suppose to

Kinda like Prolly, Probably

Or Aint, Are not going to do

Or Peeps meaning People

just slang.

[Dreamquick]

Firstly I would have to agree with mil2k on the IP spoofing issue and add that properly spoofing an IP is very much illegal and so wouldn't be practiced by a legitimate operation.

Yes you could do it the cheap way by using proxies but in my experience the anonomous ones are often unreliable & not meant to be used for the purposes you're suggesting.

Secondly Google have a *lot* of IP addresses (you should be able to verify this via your own logs), however historically they have clustered them together into two ranges which they used for GoogleBot purposes; 64.68.* and 216.239.* - personally I've seen them using 120+ different IPs within this range, but that's no where near definitive.

I have the answer for google, spen $15 a month and sign up for a new Internet Service provider once or twice a month and get new IP's, surely they can afford $30.

At $15 account might suit you or me but it wont cut it for the requirements Google has - namely lots of constant bandwidth and an SLA on the account itself. ISPs aren't really in the business of doing either of those things for $15 a month - infact you'd be hard pressed to get an SLA out of an ISP at any point unless you threw silly amounts of money at them.

There's no harm in throwing around discussion points but if you want your argument to have a suitable impact then you need to put in the proper amount of research beforehand...

- Tony