17 replies to this topic

[Jill]

The official forum definition of cloaking is contained in this article:

Why Cloaking is Always a Bad Idea

A guest article in my newsletter, written by Alan Perkins, friend, colleague and one of our forum admins.

Jill

[TheGreatDane]

Thanks Jill!

[Clintorius]

Clintorius,
the spiders access to the links are ensured by links in the noframes section of the frames file (and I get pretty good results on the SE's), so that's not a problem .

…what you suggest WOULD actually lead to cloaking. Here is why:

If a user enters the web adress directly (not from a SE), frames.html is loaded, which again loads welcome.html in the mainframe. The user can now click a menu say "Webdesign" - thereby webdesign.html is loaded into mainframe. Now if he finds the link to webdesign.html on a SE and I put in your suggested javascript, he would be redirected to frames.html, which subsequently will load welcome.html (and NOT webdesign.html). That sounds like cloaking to me...is this right or am I wrong again?  :D

Well GD, if cloaking is defined as serving different content to humans and spiders,
a technique to wrap a page into frames can never be cloaking. The page in your
'mainframe' is the same page as the stand alone page. Therefore neither the JS method
or the PHP methods are cloaking.

The problem you describe about always getting the welcomepage when you wrap a
page in frames is easyly handled. I did not show the specific code but obviously
your redirection url will include something like
location.href= ...www.frame.htm?page=thispageandnotthewelcomepage.htm.
A script in frame.htm will then look for the '?frame=' phrase and do the needed things.
In PHP you also code the corect file name into the frame template. Same thing, no laughts .

When I used frames (in the old days), I did this sort of redirect without any problems.
If the user kills JavaScript, he must be used all sort of problems on the net anyway.
Now a days I do not use frames (if it can be avoided) and I opt for CSS techniques
where possible to minimise JavaScript based DHTML.

This said just to state that i am not endorsing frames at all.

C.


C.