DanK
20-11-2001, 08:08/08:08AM
Long live the thread... well, maybe not. [not - I've split it to maintain structure - Alan] The problem with your view of cloaking is that you are trying to say that only one of the things you can do with cloaking is cloaking, and that the rest have their own completely distinct names, when cloaking is the general word, and IP delivery agent based delivery etc are all different forms of cloaking.
And the other problem I see with your stance on cloaking (regardless of the definition).
The not so hypothetical... hypothetical situation #1.
You're happily running your advertising based web site during the middle of the worst advertising slump in online history ever... suddenly different companies are trying different things to make a buck... confident that out there somewhere advertising money still exists (because it does)... and one of them says why don't we create a product that puts yellow links on peoples pages that we control... webmasters say OH ****!!! (pick any 4 letter word you want for the asterisks) and begin looking for ways to keep this from being done on their pages, after about a week of discussion and finding out that opting out isn't possible, another company (SearchKing.com for those keepin track of history) comes up with a way to disable top text, whirlywiryweb.com comes up with a way to detect the presense of top text, another person bases an ezula killer type script off of searchkings and releases it and so on. Well, all's fine... something can be done... but wait, some engines consider anything that might be a redirect to be spam, despite the fact that there are legitimate uses for a redirect, and some of these fixes rely on redirects or people perceive them to (I know, I've had a few mails about the searchking hosted script where people didn't want to run it because it might anger search engines). Now you are left with a choice, show the engine something you think is going to cause trouble but is there for a legitimate reason, or don't show it to the engine using cloaking based on the IP's of known spiders to prevent them from seeing something they are likely to interpret wrong.
If you think it's unreasonable to believe a spider will misinterpret a javascript redirect you probably haven't done much programming, javascript is a fairly free form langauge and there are a hundred ways to write a redirect that is conditional and may not even be used for the bulk of the people entering the site, it might rely on a certain class being installed on the machine, but it's unlikely that a search engine that considers all forms of redirects to be spam will have the capability to determine if the redirect is useless. It's a little ironic that you'd have to use cloaking which an engine might consider spam, to hide from the engine something legitimate like a redirect used to send people infected with toptext to a page warning them about it, because an engine will most likely consider a redirect spam too. So now you are stuck between scumware and an engine, allow your site to be raped by thieves, or use technology in a legitimate way and run your business...
And the other problem I see with your stance on cloaking (regardless of the definition).
The not so hypothetical... hypothetical situation #1.
You're happily running your advertising based web site during the middle of the worst advertising slump in online history ever... suddenly different companies are trying different things to make a buck... confident that out there somewhere advertising money still exists (because it does)... and one of them says why don't we create a product that puts yellow links on peoples pages that we control... webmasters say OH ****!!! (pick any 4 letter word you want for the asterisks) and begin looking for ways to keep this from being done on their pages, after about a week of discussion and finding out that opting out isn't possible, another company (SearchKing.com for those keepin track of history) comes up with a way to disable top text, whirlywiryweb.com comes up with a way to detect the presense of top text, another person bases an ezula killer type script off of searchkings and releases it and so on. Well, all's fine... something can be done... but wait, some engines consider anything that might be a redirect to be spam, despite the fact that there are legitimate uses for a redirect, and some of these fixes rely on redirects or people perceive them to (I know, I've had a few mails about the searchking hosted script where people didn't want to run it because it might anger search engines). Now you are left with a choice, show the engine something you think is going to cause trouble but is there for a legitimate reason, or don't show it to the engine using cloaking based on the IP's of known spiders to prevent them from seeing something they are likely to interpret wrong.
If you think it's unreasonable to believe a spider will misinterpret a javascript redirect you probably haven't done much programming, javascript is a fairly free form langauge and there are a hundred ways to write a redirect that is conditional and may not even be used for the bulk of the people entering the site, it might rely on a certain class being installed on the machine, but it's unlikely that a search engine that considers all forms of redirects to be spam will have the capability to determine if the redirect is useless. It's a little ironic that you'd have to use cloaking which an engine might consider spam, to hide from the engine something legitimate like a redirect used to send people infected with toptext to a page warning them about it, because an engine will most likely consider a redirect spam too. So now you are stuck between scumware and an engine, allow your site to be raped by thieves, or use technology in a legitimate way and run your business...