Re: Custom pages for robots!

At 10:04 AM 12/2/99 -0600, Leland V. Lammert wrote:
>I recently learned of a product that is supposed to recognize a robot by it's IP and then serve a custom page designed to meet the criteria for that specific search engine to index, while normal users receive the standard index.html. Supposedly, it makes the process of ranking in a specific search engine system many times higher than allowing the robot to actually index the site pages 
>
>Has anyone heard of anything like this?

Seems to be gaining popularity under the name "cloaking" - it is a variation on the method of building "bridge" pages, or pages specially optimized for Search Engine spiders. The thing about cloaking is that it is difficult for the Search Engines to compensate for it without a lot of extra labor, so it has proven quite effective to date. It was initially based on the name of the spider (ie. Scooter for Altavista, etc.) but the Search Engines started masking their spiders' names, so they are now based on the originating IP of the Search Engine. 

No doubt the Search Engines will combat that by using different IP numbers soon enough, but until then, it may be possible to gain a little Search Engine positioning by using this technique.

Cheers

Kevin A. Jackson, Webmaster
mailto:kevin(at)biz-zone.com

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