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Cloaking Detection?

Posted by Cliff on from the use-your-cloaking-device-hahaha!-I-didn't-think-so dept.

drcrja asks: "I am conducting some academic research on the use of cloaking and how it affects search engine rankings (cloaking is the practice of delivering a specially optimized page to search engine spiders while delivering a completely different page to the user). I am currently using Alta Vista's Babel Fish to retrieve pages and compare those pages to the pages on the actual web sites but I am trying to find other methods of detecting cloaking. I am wondering if any members of the /. community have any experience with this?"

1 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. google's cache; search engine cloak=bad by Craig+Ringer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hi
    First: sometimes google cached copies of pages might be informative.

    Changing your browser's User-agent str won't always detect the cloaking, as it is quite likely to be configured to work by ip addr block too (googlebot!). Similarly, babelfish may not show cloaked pages because it comes from a different IP than altavista'a index bots and this can be checked for in the cloaking server's config.

    Second: it is *imperitave* that search engines keep unique user-agent strings that identify them. P'haps none of you who suggested the engine change user-agent str runs a website? It would remove a great tool from log analasys, and in the end make no difference to cloakers as they'd just do engine detection by IP anyway.