Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Or, and instance where a different robots.txt is presented to google, than to a browser?
They make no use of it at all.
I don't see how you could ever know if the robots.txt was cloaked.
If I can see different robots.txt using normal user-agent header and different if using "googlebot" user agent, that's a prove of cloaking, and I understand that's what nippi's talking about.
Why would you even bother to show a robots.txt file to a browser?
To confuse your competition, obviously.
Why not show nothing to the browser?
Even less work. Looks like there is no robots file at all.
<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow">If the cloaking is done properly, it is difficult to detect - assuming that there is a noarchive tag as well, otherwise you can see it in the Cache link in the serps.
I think the original paster was referring to robots meta tags rather than a robots.txt
I have seen both, and both may be used in similiar purposes.
All this probably for a links page to "convert" link exchanges into one-way links.
You're right.
If the cloaking is done properly, it is difficult to detect - assuming that there is a noarchive tag as well, otherwise you can see it in the Cache link in the serps.
But seeing no cache for links page of you linking partner may be red flag itself - he's hiding something! When I was using cloaking to stuff keywords in the past, in times when it used to work, I always used 'noarchive' tag in order to prevent people from seeing how cloaked page appeared.
[Added: ...unless the robots.txt itself gets indexed, which from a quick search in Google can sometimes happen.]
Lets say some site hogs PR by NOT showing outbound links to G and Y,
but DOES show them to anybody browing. A cloaked links page say.
Is there some way I can detect this? - Larry
