Cloaking in the Blogosphere

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One of the more useful plugins for wordpress is Bad Behavior, basically it looks for people or spiders who are “misbehaving” or “acting strange” bans the IP and send them an error page. It works well in keeping troublemakers out, however it creates problems with services like Technorati, and if you change your useragent to pass yourself off a s bot BadBehavior will ban you. I’ve banned myself from my own blog more times than I care to admit.

I was trying to go to Aaron’s SEO Buzz Box forgot that I had changed my useragent to Googlebot and got myself banned. Fortunately I know Aaron and so I dropped him an email and e fixed the problem. However I had a light bulb moment right after that. Now if you are going to engage in cloaking, IP delivery is a much more effective and safe way to do it, when compared to basic user agent cloaking (just ask BMW). However here’s a neat little trick for cloaking if you run a wordpress blog.

Install the Bad Behavior plugin. Hack your wordpress template up with the groovy user agent cloaking script of your choice. If someone suspects you are up to some funny business and tries to change their useragent to Googlebot to check things out BAM, bad behavior kicks in and locks them out, until you let them back in. You could also hack up a script to catch people who come in from a search engine cache and redirect them elsewhere.

Sphere It

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