Cloaking for good

preventing ads to be crawled.

[sdani]

Greetings all.

I have searched on this site before posting here as I thought this might have been asked before, but probably I did not use the right search words.

I display 2-3 text ads on each page of my web site. They are basically Commission Junction Text Ads.

I want to do something on my pages so that spider's don't get those ads (I suspect that if they do find those ad links, they will follow those links and go away from my web site quite often as I have 2-3 links on each page).

What is the best way to implement it, and not get blacklisted in spider's list for cloaking.

I am thinking of - 1)making the ads some lkind of html form - so the spider will not follow submit button, but then the whole text is not clickable.
2) Making the whole text an image with white background and making that a submit button of the form.
3) SImply use Cloaking and disply ads only to user agents, which are IE / Netscape or Opera?

TIA for your inputs.
sdani

[Nick_W]

>best way

Don't worry about it. SE's wont leave your site, that's not how it works ;)

Cloaking is cloaking. The SE's don't like it so either a) don't do it. b) dont get caught doing it. Your motivation is largely irrelevant..

Nick

[sdani]

Thanks Nick.

[volatilegx]

I disagree, Nick (respectfully). I believe no penalty would be applied to a page that "cloaked" in this fashion, should the site be human reviewed. Motivation is very relevent--the "cloaking is cloaking" opinion is just that--an opinion, and not everybody shares it. There are plenty of high profile sites that "cloak", i.e. show differing content based on the identity or location of the viewer, which are not penalized or banned for doing so.

I believe method #3 would be the most efficient in terms of bandwidth.

However, Nick is right when he says it doesn't matter if a spider leaves your site. Spiders don't "leave" or "stay" on sites. They gather the links they are interested in and spider the web pages indicated in the links. Then they move on to the next site. Outgoing links do not cause them to quit spidering your site any sooner.