Sphinn - The Long Road To The Debate Over "White Hat Cloaking"

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The Long Road To The Debate Over "White Hat Cloaking"

Went Hot: July 3, 2008 - 1:40 am
Posted By: PPCblogger 368 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: Google SEO

I really hate arguments over cloaking. Like really hate them. But Rand Fishkin recently did a chart outlining the degrees of "safeness" to cloaking that in turn riled up Google's Matt Cutts in comments there. So I wanted to revisit some of the things that Rand outlined about cloaking plus the guidelines Google updated last month.

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from TheMadHat 367 days ago #

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I couldn't care less about the argument, I just still have questions Google refuses to answer. How about content delivery based on user behavior? If the bot behaves like a user it will see the same content. Or how about people who previously visited and have my cookie? Can I give them different content because I know who they are? (this is without logging in) This is the same thing as "IP Delivery" but it's called behavioral targeting. This provides a better user experience and I'm not trying to trick a bot, but I'm pretty sure Google will crush my skull in their webmaster smasher if I do it.

from WebmasterT 367 days ago #

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TheMadHat if the cookie does it then it's not cloaking since a crawler can't use a cookie. I totally disagree about using the userAgent only because if you are doing REAL content delivery the userAgent is the best way to know the capabilities of the Agent which in the new environment would also deliver content by the Device ie phone. Bad cloaking almost always uses an IP to identify a crawler. Like always if you aren't doing it for SE's you are greatly reducing risk... because that is the context the whole cloaking debate should be in not WH or BH just good or stupid manipulation!

IMO, Whitehat Cloaking is an OxyMoron much like Army Intelligence is an oxymoron!