cloaking without getting revealed in the g. cache

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cloaking without getting revealed in the g. cache

is this possible?

havarian

12:37 pm on Jul 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

I know i can use the nocache tag, but many on this board warns against this.
Anybody have reallife experince with the nocache (or heard of their aunt doing this)?
Or is their any other way around the problem getting revealed in the google and others cache?
and please keep the ethics somewhere else.

Nick_W

1:00 pm on Jul 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

I have never had a problem with nocache. The other way might be to have a piece of script looking to see if a query string contains the term 'cache' and serve up somthing different and misleading.

Ultimately though, if you play the cloaking game you gotta expect to get burned by your competitors at some point. Especialy in high gain markets. That's just the way it is...

Nick

havarian

3:08 pm on Jul 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

thx for the answar nick,its apriciated, i know its risky, but i go for it both for the work, but also for the fun.
Is there anybody who heard of a script like that nick refer to that actually works

Dreamquick

3:20 pm on Jul 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

I have never had a problem with nocache. The other way might be to have a piece of script looking to see if a query string contains the term 'cache' and serve up somthing different and misleading.

Forgive my ignorance but...

Unless you used client-side script to redirect (v. easy for competitors to disable, equally easy to be banned for using it since it only has one purpose) then this wouldn't be possible because at the point the page *has* the term cache in its querystring it's already been indexed and is being served up as static content (hence cached) by Google.

...unless of course you detect a user coming into your site from the cache, at which point showing the user something different and misleading probably wouldn't help.

- Tony

[edited by: Dreamquick at 4:08 pm (utc) on July 30, 2003]

Nick_W

3:58 pm on Jul 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

>> but also for the fun.

Absolutely.

Nick

Friday

6:54 pm on Aug 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

Beware also, Bablefish, AltaVista's translation service. DO not cloak for AV's Babelfish spiders. Many a cloaker has been discovered by his/her competitors by translating their page from, for example, spanish into English and vice-versa.

claus

8:40 pm on Aug 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

oh, speaking of caches, there's also the girafabot and the alexa-thing, although i'm not so sure about the latter.. and then it's also pretty simple to pretend you're Googlebot, so you should probably check the IP as well as the UA string....

havarian

3:01 pm on Aug 19, 2003 (gmt 0)

thx for the replies friday and claus, i will take the proper precaution, and i sure check by ip.

volatilegx

1:50 am on Aug 21, 2003 (gmt 0)

Unless you used client-side script to redirect (v. easy for competitors to disable, equally easy to be banned for using it since it only has one purpose) then this wouldn't be possible because at the point the page *has* the term cache in its querystring it's already been indexed and is being served up as static content (hence cached) by Google.

They might have been talking about client-side scripting, which is possible to execute from the cache... however, it's also very easy to disable.

Yidaki

9:50 am on Aug 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

>I know i can use the nocache tag, but many on this board warns against this

Just to clear things a little bit, i guess you know this allready though:

No-Cache has no negative side effect and doesn't keep google from caching yopur pages at all! No-Cache pragma is used to avoid browser caching and cache-control should avoid proxy caching (given that a browser / proxy obeys this tags).

The only tag that avoids google caching your pages is the noarchive tag.

volatilegx

2:44 pm on Aug 26, 2003 (gmt 0)

Yidaki, absolutely correct! I often get these tags confused.

debbiea

12:42 am on Aug 31, 2003 (gmt 0)

I was #6 now I am #17 in MSN. All 16 ahead of me are cloaked. I am not a programmer. What is the fix?

volatilegx

3:43 am on Sep 4, 2003 (gmt 0)

Are you positive they are cloaked? MSN uses results from Overture, I believe, and those results are paid for. Therefore, the new rankings above yours may have paid for their ranking, and of course they are allowed to set their own titles and descriptions in the search results.

If you are certain they are cloaked, remember that Inktomi (MSN uses Inktomi for their search engine results) does allow "trusted feed" cloaking. Trusted feed is when you pay them to submit your own title, meta description and some body text for certain pages on your site... it amounts to a sanctioned type of pay-for-play cloaking.

If, on the other hand, you don't believe this is what's happening, you could try reporting them to Inktomi as spammers. Good luck with that. I don't think Inktomi is as good about spam reports as Google.

Dan

Friday

4:30 pm on Sep 4, 2003 (gmt 0)

I was #6 now I am #17 in MSN. All 16 ahead of me are cloaked. I am not a programmer. What is the fix?

Cloak better.
;)