nps John,
i'll hear from you when you are ready.
plh
paul

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Posted by Big Bill on February 21, 2008, 5:12 pm

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>> I don't want certain humans (only a few hundred in number but all on

>> dynamic IPs in several countries) to be able to read the robots.txt that

>> I'm giving search engines because I don't want them to know what pages I

>> am telling SE's "disallow"

>Maybe it helps if you explain the why. Which is not: I don't want them to

>read. What do you want to achieve? Why should those people not be able to

>read your robots.txt

>> What's so wrong with this?

>To me it sounds pointless. I see no gain in it, but maybe you can explain

>better the *why*?

>BTW: I disagree with others that Google et al should have a problem with

>this. Although it's cloaking, it's not something (in this case) Google

>should care about. It's like getting upset about a site that shows a flag

>on its page based on the country you connect from, and feeds Google a flag

>of the USA :-)

I never said they'd care about it, just that it was cloaking.

BB
--

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Posted by Don on February 21, 2008, 8:58 pm

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b348-49a9cacc2453@n77g2000hse.googlegroups.com:

>> Perhaps I didn't say it right. I'm wanting to block the robots.txt that

>> I'm feeding search engines from being given to anybody else.

> If Google catch you they will exclude you from the index.

> 'Don't deceive your users or present different content to search

> engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as

> "cloaking." '

It's done ALL the time.
What matters is that it's done for an appropiate reason and is accomplished
server side.

Posted by John Bokma on February 21, 2008, 10:10 pm

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> It's done ALL the time.

> What matters is that it's done for an appropiate reason and is

> accomplished server side.

To me, what matters, is that a user doesn't click on a search result, and
comes on a page that doesn't make the expected data available.

And yes, even that does seem to be allowed by Google. There is a forum
that uses JS cloaking. Can't find a quick example, will post when I bump
into it again. The solution is to turn either JS off, or click on cached
link. But it's a sad practice and even sadder that Google allows for it.

webmasterworld (IIRC) did use cloaking, maybe still does. I've reported
this several times to Google, but no use (unless it has been fixed)

--
John Bokma http://johnbokma.com/

Posted by Don on February 21, 2008, 10:37 pm

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>> It's done ALL the time.

>> What matters is that it's done for an appropiate reason and is

>> accomplished server side.

> To me, what matters, is that a user doesn't click on a search result,

> and comes on a page that doesn't make the expected data available.

John,
Believe this is the goal of most webnasters, however there is specific
traffic that individual webasters simply have no desire for.
That's their own decision and each webamster must determine what is
benefical or detrimental their own site (s).

> webmasterworld (IIRC) did use cloaking, maybe still does. I've

> reported this several times to Google, but no use (unless it has been

> fixed)

Webmaster World has had many problems in getting their extensive forums
and pages sipdered propperly, without allowing harvesting by other forums.
Brett does a superb job at providing mutiple forums for participants the
world over.
Here's a 2005 explanation:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum9/9618.htm

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