Matt Cutts Defined Cloaking

[Irony]

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/boston-pubcon-2006-day-1/#comments

The second comment is by Matt. He defines cloaking from Google's perspective and outlines the difference between cloaking and IP delivery.

IP delivery: delivering results to users based on IP address.
Cloaking: showing different pages to users than to search engines.

He also explains that using IP delivery for geotargeting is not cloaking, and is a legal technique, but detecting users from "Googlelandia" and sending them to pages created for Googlebot only is cloaking.

Strange... spammers haven't rushed yet to explain Matt that he is wrong. :D Probably, they will, as soon as they notice that new thread.

[ihelpyou]

Yes, great stuff!

I see DS did not mention it at all with his post in there. He is one of those that likes to blur the lines of the definition of cloaking as well.

It's also the same definition we all have tried to use for years now. Funny that the spammers are always quick to dispute our definition in here, but I don't see any of them disputing Matt's same definition. :D

[Blue]

Ammunition. :D

[Connie]

Good to see someone from Google finally speaking on the issue.

[ihelpyou]

Yeah, and notice how the threadwatch spammers have a thread now trying to discredit what Matt wrote. :green:

They know for a fact that their only hope and prayer is to blur and obscure the definition of "cloaking", which is very clear to many of us.

[g1smd]

Not only, but also, http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/boston-pubcon-2006/#comment-22221

"We don’t spam the search engines, we just put the spam up on our webservers and then get lots of links to spam. It’s the engines’ fault for picking up our content."

[ihelpyou]

BTW:

Here's a quote from a MODERATOR at the SEW forums:
Matt, is usualy a very smart guy but in this case he is playing a political game rather than a technical correct one. Its a hopeless fight, Matt, don't try to define the technical difference between IP delivery and cloaking because there are none. Instead, just focus on the fact that you, and any engine, can decide whatever you think is spam and delete it if you don't like it. That simple. Don't use silly arguments for your editorial policies that makes no sense when you have other perfect ones that works much better.
That's at TW as well.

This is the kind of mentality and stupidity we have in this industry. These spammers cannot stand the facts. They don't want to hear the truth. They have zero desire to make sure the everyday joe understands what the hell cloaking really is.

Cloaking = Deception/Hiding

Regular IP delivery is NOT hiding a damn thing. It's not cloaking if you detect an agent and send that agent to the correct country. Anyone calling that cloaking is trying their damn best to make sure the "public" at large stays confused. The spammers that do this are doing it because if it becomes common knowledge that these spammers are only in it for the money, and to confuse the average joe, the spammers will be out of business. Period.

These forums main goal is to put ALL spammers out of business. Period.

That quote is the most ridiculous and insane thing I have read in quite awhile. That's YOUR BOY there DS. That's your SES speaker as well.

[ihelpyou]

That thread goes on and on.

What people are missing completely is the fact that you have to discuss the word "cloaking" in the context of:

search engine spam

Showing different pages to "users" is NOT search engine spam. It's

user spam

Showing different content to "search engine spiders" other than what a "user" gets is called:

search engine spam

There IS A DIFFERENCE. All you people at TW don't seem to understand the difference.

When I refer to spam, I'm always referring to:

search engine spam

If you are "cloaking", you are showing different content to a SPIDER.

If you are implementing IP delivery; you are showing different content "based on the AGENT" requesting it.

Cloaking is "detecting" a search engine spider and showing that spider different content than a browser will see.

IP delivery is detecting the "user agent" and showing different content based on "many" type things including; country origin, geo-specific, flash installed?, javascript installed?.... it could be detecting many, many different things. It's NOT cloaking. It's NOT search engine spam.

You are NOT detecting search engine spiders. If you specifically detect a search engine spider, and delivering that spider something different other than what a browser will see, you are "cloaking". Period.

Spammers want to truly confuse new webmasters and new seo's about all of this. It's really very simple. Yes really.

[ArmenT]

Doug, you've got the right intention, but you have some of the technical concepts flipped around.

IP delivery has to do with exactly what the name sounds like. It works by checking the IP address, not the User Agent. Most IP delivery schemes will pop you into the correct country specific server irrespective of your browser's user-agent. IP address blocks are allocated to each country and thus you can determine where a person is coming from. Some user-agents give you some hints about the language that the user is using, but not all. For instance, these are two user-agents from the SAME computer.
IE: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Firefox: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.2) Gecko/20060308 Firefox/1.5.0.2
Notice that IE doesn't tell you what language I use, but Firefox has en-US indicating American English. Incidentally, you can't tell that I have flash installed or not from the user-agent. Neither can you tell if I have javascript turned on or not. You can never detect that from the user-agent. You need to use javascript code to set a cookie and let the backend try to detect the cookie on the next request. If no cookie, the user doesn't have javascript turned on.

About the only useful legitimate reason with checking the user-agent is if you want to display different pages depending on the browser the user is coming on, because of the technical capabilities (or lack thereof) of the browser. In the early days, people used to do this with Netscape vs. other browsers, because Netscape was able to display some nifty bells and whistles (for instance, javascript) that other browsers did not feature at all. As other browsers began to adapt Netscape's features, they changed their user-agent to imitate Netscape, so that people could view the pages meant for Netscape with whatever browser they were using. This is why you see "Mozilla/x.x (compatible" in different versions of IE and Opera, since "Mozilla/x.x" was the user-agent of different versions of Netscape. Now a days, people don't bother to do this anymore. Instead they usually design a single page that uses the least common capabilities of all browsers. Otherwise, they simply put up a big "Designed for IE version X" banner banner in the front page and hope all the users use IE version X to visit their pages.

Cloaking also involves checking into IPs sometimes. However cloaking also usually checks the user-agent as well (which IP delivery almost never does). Cloaking involves much more fine-grained checking of the IP address to determine if an IP block is owned by a search engine or not (rather than a country). However, since search engines acquire new IP blocks every now and then, cloaking scripts also check the user-agent. For instance, all of Google's spiders say "Googlebot" in the user-agent field and thus, cloaking scripts can take advantage of this to determine whether to cloak or not.

[ihelpyou]

Okay yes. My words were wrong.

The bottom line is that if you are detecting se spiders, and showing them something different, you are cloaking, which is se spam. If you are detecting IP's for the purpose of "anything" else other than se spiders, you are "not" cloaking.

Cloaking is "hiding".... erm, .. to cloak.

Search engine spam is just that..... se spam. You are hiding the content the browser sees from the search engine spider. ... cloaking.

Spammers say "google cloaks". That's false. Google is not trying to hide anything. They are detecting the IP of whatever is requesting their server, and showing content based on the origin. They are not detecting se spiders at all. They are not cloaking.

There are many forms of "content delivery". Cloaking is one technique that is under the general term of "content delivery". Cloaking is the only technique that is "always" search engine spam.

[Comeran]

It just seems so much simpler when you think about it using the G webmaster guidelines.

Stop and ask yourself "is this best for my visitors"

Would cloaking content ever be best for a customer? :p

The only thing that you need to do for the SE's is remove the sessions from your url strings.

Just my 2 cents :p

Comeran-

[ihelpyou]

:hi: Comeran!

Don't be a stranger. :)

[Comeran]

Thanks Doug.

I am always so busy with the projects that I am trying to keep up with :p Even if I don't post I am always around reading and keeping up.

Comeran-

[ihelpyou]

Great avatar! :up:

[Comeran]

I need a better pic of myself :p That one will do for now.

I like this one you use now much better than the old school one you had for years :p

You look thinner now too, do a lot of running lately?

Comeran-