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That 'policy' is still actually in effect, I believe, in Google's webmaster guidelines. They just don't enforce it. Years ago (early 2000s) Google used to most
by bhartzer 3y ago
That 'policy' is still actually in effect, I believe, in Google's webmaster guidelines. They just don't enforce it.
Years ago (early 2000s) Google used to mostly crawl using Google-owned IPs, but they'd occasionally use Comcast or some other ISPs (partners) to crawl. If you were IP cloaking, you'd have to look out for those pesky non-Google IPs. I know, as I used to play that IP cloaking game back in the early 2000s, mostly using scripts from a service called "IP Delivery".
- bhartzer 3y agoYou can actually get a manual action (penalty) from Google if you do IP cloaking/redirects. It's still mentioned prominently in Google's Webmaster Guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en#zippy=%2Ccloaking-andor-sneaky-redirects https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en#z...
- franze 3y agoAnd then there is Dynamic Rendering which OKed cloaking https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/javascript/dynamic-rendering https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/... and the there are AMP pages which is Google Enforced cloaking...
- londons_explore 3y agoI think by now all search engines run JavaScript and index the rendered page...
- gildas 3y agoAs the founder of SEO4Ajax, I can assure you that this is far from the case. Googlebot, for example, still has great difficulty indexing dynamically generated JavaScript content on the client side.
- charrondev 3y agoThis isn’t about JavaScript vs no JavaScript. It’s about serving different pages based on User Agent.
- LoulouMonkey 3y agoNot sure about now, but I worked in the T&S Webspam team (in Dublin, Ireland) until 2021, and we were very much enforcing cloaking. It was, however, one of the most difficult types of spam to detect and penalise, at scale.
- mrwiseowl 3y agoCurious. How is it detected in the first place if not reported like in this case?
- jiveturkey 3y agosampling from non-bot-IPs and non-bot UAs
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- amluto 3y agoIs it even well defined? On the one hand, there’s “cloaking,” which is forbidden. On the other hand, there’s “gating,” which is allowed, and seems to frequency consist of showing all manner of spammy stuff and requests for personal information in lieu of the indexed content. Are these really clearly different? And then there’s whatever Pinterest does, which seems awfully like cloaking or bait-and-switch or something: you get a high ranked image search result, you click it, and the page you see is in no way relevant to the search or related to the image thumbnail you clicked.