Watching the UA header, and even maintaining a list of known search engine IP addresses is fairly common in the porn industry to disguise the layout of a page that makes it to the top listing on particular keywords.

It's generally used by people who don't want someone to come along and build a similar page that would have the same high ranking. As such, the UA header is usless with that goal in mind, since it obviously can be spoofed.

Anyway, some search engines despise this practice (called "cloaking"), since some people will get "XXX Hardcore Fuxor Pictures" listed on the keyword "Baseball" or something that equally undermines the effectiveness of the search engine. These engines (and I wish I had a current list) don't care if you have a legitimate reason for cloaking, and will ban you anyway.

More rational search engines (a group I'm sure Google belongs in) will tolerate cloaking that doesn't impact how well they help people find sites that match their keywords.

Check out IP Delivery, a poorly written perl program that sells for an absurd amount of money to cloak pages.

In reply to Re: chatterbox & search engines (cloaking) by Hutta
in thread chatterbox & search engines by jackdied

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.