Search Engine Friendly Cloaking

Yesterday I had a discussion with a potential client who liked me to optimize the search engine crawler support on a fairly large dynamic Web site. A moment before he hitted submit on my order form, I stressed the point that his goals aren't achievable without white hat cloaking. He is pretty much concerned about cloaking, and that's understandable with regard to the engine's webmaster guidelines and the cloaking hysteria across the white hat message boards.

To make a long story short, I'm a couple hours ahead of his local time and at 2:00am I wasn't able to bring my point home. Probably I've lost the contract, what is not a bad thing, because obviously I've produced a communication problem resulting in lost confidence. To get the best out of it, after a short sleep I've written down what I should have told him.

Here is my tiny guide to search engine friendly cloaking. The article explains a search engine's view on cloaking, provides evidence on tolerated cloaking, and gives some examples of white hat cloaking which is pretty much appreciated by the engines:

• Truncating session IDs and similar variable/value pairs in query strings
• Reducing the number of query string arguments
• Stripping affiliate IDs and referrer identifiers
• Preventing search engines from indexing duplicated content

I hope it's a good read, and perhaps it helps me out next time I've to explain good cloaking.

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