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consultant
Joined: Feb 20, 2002
# Posts: 91
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Posted: 02/01/2008 12:03 pm
We are seeing an increasing amount of evidence that Google is detecting IP Delivery (aka cloaking) on home pages and figuring it into their search algo. We've been using IP delivery on several websites for several years. We became most confident recently with a search index update that happened probably in the last month. We are seeing on our smaller, older, stagnant sites, the home page has disappeared out of the index (using site:domain.com search on Google) but all the sub-pages remain! The difference? We are only using IP Delivery to redirect the home page and no other pages! The sub pages are not being cloaked. The home pages for these sites used to be ranked. We made no changes to them in the past 6 months.
However on our largest most dynamic site which has many more inbound links, the home page is still ranked. So it appears if Google detects it is a major enough site, it essentially 'looks the other way' when determining if the site is using IP Delivery. One difference about this site though is that the cloaked content is very similar to the content delivered to the users browser, where as the other sites actually redirect the browser to a different website with similar content instead of serving a different page on the same domain.
How Google is detecting this I don't know but it could be from competitors complaining, although I would expect if that were the case, the entire site would be de-indexed not just the cloaked home page.
The evidence does seem to be fairly strong that either the spider or Google staff are reviewing for cloaked pages somehow. It seems a spider could easily spoof itself as a browser on a bank of unknown IP's and maybe just check home pages of sites in order not to exhibit 'spidering' activity that would reveal it was a spider and not a user with a browser. It would seem if they are doing this though, it would have eventually leaked out or been discovered. So then the explanation of competitors complaining seems more plausible, but maybe not, as I pointed out, only the home page was removed, not the entire site and this seemed to happened all at once during an index update.
The point of this post is not to discuss the ethics in using IP Delivery. So I don't need to hear "shame on you Black Hat SEO." We use it in order to give the marketing department the freedom to create pages exactly the way they like, with Flash, etc., and the SEO guy can tweak the content however he likes - the same information is displayed, just in two different formats either on the same website or redirected to another website.
What I'm wondering is if anyone else out there using IP Delivery has also started to suspect Google is testing for it. There was an artcle a while back that Microsoft admited to testing for it although I can't remember if it was just a user-agent test or if they actually setup some stealth IP's.
Seems like anyone could do it as long as the didn't spide the whole site as then webmasters could easily identifiy it as a spider and then it gets added to the IP list of engine spiders.
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bhartzer
Staff
Joined: Jun 08, 2000
# Posts: 7036
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Posted: 02/01/2008 03:09 pm
detecting IP Delivery
It's been known for a while now that Google has "partners" and they, from time to time, will use those partners to spider sites. (So, they could use another ISP/partner as a part of their normal spidering activity.)
I don't think it's an issue of Google trying to catch you--they might just be buying bandwidth from other providers because they need it to keep up. But again, if they find different versions of pages then they could put up a red flag and flag it for review.
I've actually used IP Delivery for several years--and it's always worked out well for me as long as you keep up with the IP updates.
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Quadrille
Joined: Nov 15, 2000
# Posts: 1064
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Posted: 02/01/2008 05:32 pm
Google have put more resources into following up complaints manually, so that is certainly possible.
But, like you, I suspect the whole site would be affected rather than just the one page, if that was the case.
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