My friend Jaimie Sirovich sent me a chapter of his upcoming techy SEO book. More specifically, he sent me the chapter on cloaking, geo-targeting and IP-delivery. It’s a fun read, and his example scripts are very, very complete and work nicely.
Of course you can have all sorts of debates on whether cloaking is a tactic you should employ as an SEO, but that all depends on who you work for. Don’t do it if your client is a small firm, because Google might spank you for it… If you work for the New York Times though, cloak all you want!
If you want to cloak, and you use PHP, this book will make it possible for you to have your first cloaked page up in a matter of minutes. The chapter explains in-depth what the differences between cloaking, geo-targeting and IP delivery are, and I was struck by the ease of use of the geo-targeting script. I do work for a few international clients, and some of them complain that geo-targeting is very hard to do, having seen how easy it is to implement this, I’ve got some very good new arguments.
This SEO book will be a standard among SEO’s, and every SEO, newbie or experienced, should make sure he get’s it.
PS: I have NOT put in my Amazon affiliate id, as I want you guys to REALLY believe that this is my own opinion and not a sales page ;)
Too bad you’re not allowed to post the contents of that chapter… :)
hehe, just buy it, it’s worth it, I can assure you :)
I will :)
Nice thing about the book, i think, it’s written clearly.. it covers as good as most points, from basics to advanced. Just a good book to have in your collection. Everyone has his own tactics but this is nice to have and to read if you like SEO.
I am not that familiar with this kind of tactics. But let me suggest just a wild guess:
preg_match(“/[^\.\/]+\.[^\.\/]+$/”, $_SERVER[REMOTE_HOST], $hostname);
$hostname = $hostname[0];
if(($hostname == “googlebot.com”)) {
echo “Special content to index…”;
} else {
echo “User content…”;
}
That’d be quite stupid to do, to be honest :) I’d buy the book if I were you :)
Gerben: btw, the reason why that’s not smart, is because the hostname can be spoofed AND Google might not always identify itself like that…
Ok, I might get the book ;-)