One of my client's competitors appears to be serving full page content to googlebot, but a login page to anyone else that requests these articles. Is this tactic kosher?
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Serving Different Content To Search Engine Spider?
Started by
eggman2001
, Mar 25 2008 06:21 PM
10 replies to this topic
#2
Jill
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Posted 25 March 2008 - 06:27 PM
It's called cloaking, and is generally frowned upon by the search engines (but not always).
#3
eggman2001
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Posted 26 March 2008 - 09:38 AM
It seems like a lot of sites do this. While it would increase the amount of search engine traffic, I wonder how much good it does for the site. It's certainly at least a little irritating for the user. At the same time, it encourages the user to subscribe/register.
#4
Scottie
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Posted 26 March 2008 - 01:45 PM
Can you see the full page content in Google's cache?
#5
eggman2001
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Posted 27 March 2008 - 10:12 AM
QUOTE(Scottie @ Mar 26 2008, 02:45 PM) 
Can you see the full page content in Google's cache?
Actually, there's no "Cached" link in the Google listing
#6
Jill
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Posted 28 March 2008 - 06:29 PM
QUOTE(eggman2001 @ Mar 27 2008, 11:12 AM)
Actually, there's no "Cached" link in the Google listing
Which is another good indication that they're cloaking.
#7
Alan Perkins
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#9
Guest_ErinDecker_*
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Posted 22 April 2008 - 09:29 AM
Would this be an example of requesting not to be cached?
We have suspicions that a competitor is cloaking their site with ours, but we are having a difficult time proving it. I am able to see a cache in Google when I search for them and it appears legit, but in their source code, they have included the above.
Any thoughts on tell-tale signs of cloaking besides the "no cache" one?
Thanks!
QUOTE
<meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache" />
We have suspicions that a competitor is cloaking their site with ours, but we are having a difficult time proving it. I am able to see a cache in Google when I search for them and it appears legit, but in their source code, they have included the above.
Any thoughts on tell-tale signs of cloaking besides the "no cache" one?
Thanks!
#10
Randy
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Posted 22 April 2008 - 11:35 AM
That one isn't going to affect the search engines Erin. And yes I realize it's confusing since everyone refers to it as caching and that one says no-cache. That particular instruction is for browsers however.
A no cache instruction for the spiders would be part of the meta robots tag. And would look like
On the larger issue of cloaking, the easiest way to sort out if someone is cloaking or not if they're not allowing the engines to cache or archive content is to set up a browser to emulate Googlebot, etc. Even this wouldn't figure out those that trigger in the originating IP number, but most cloakers triger on the user-agent, not the IP number.
A no cache instruction for the spiders would be part of the meta robots tag. And would look like
CODE
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">
On the larger issue of cloaking, the easiest way to sort out if someone is cloaking or not if they're not allowing the engines to cache or archive content is to set up a browser to emulate Googlebot, etc. Even this wouldn't figure out those that trigger in the originating IP number, but most cloakers triger on the user-agent, not the IP number.
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