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Bending the Rules

A typical situation when “bending the rules” may be useful is when a site already exists and presents a

flaw that cannot be overcome without a complete redesign. Usually a complete redesign, in the context

of a functioning web site, is a complex and arduous undertaking. At best, it cannot be done within the

time limits prescribed. At worst, it is completely impossible either due to budget or internal politics.

Perhaps the site is designed entirely in Flash (see Chapter 6), or it employs a URL-based session-handler

that could throw a spider into a spider-trap of circular, or infinite references. If a total application rewrite

is not an option — as is usually the case —

cloaking

may be employed. Cloaking implies delivering different

content depending on whether the user agent is a human or a search engine spider. In the former case, an

HTML-based version of the site could be presented to the search engine spiders instead of the Flash ver-

sion. In the latter case, when the user agent is a spider, the site could use cloaking to remove the session

ID and other potentially confusing parameters from the URL, hence removing the spider-trap.

A well-known example of cloaking is that employed by the

New York Times

. Essentially, the

New York

Times

web site requests users to create (and pay for) an account with them for certain premium content —

as shown in Figure 8-1.

However, this restriction isn’t imposed on search engines. Indeed, the

New York Times

allows search

engines to browse and index its content without an account, which most probably gets

http://

www.nytimes.com/

a lot of incoming traffic from search engines. A full write-up is available at

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3613561

.

Figure 8-1

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Chapter 8: Black Hat SEO

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