One of my pet peeves is all the tools people use to spy on other people’s sites, not to mention scrapers just ripping things off, so I came up with a variety of methods to combat the situation and hide part of my SEO from prying eyes.
The first step is using NOARCHIVE on all the pages to eliminate the search engine cache so prying eyes can’t look elsewhere.
The second step was to only send search engine directives to the search engines and not the end users. This makes perfectly good sense on many levels because browsers don’t support search engine META tags, nor the rel=NOFOLLOW in links on pages, so you can eliminate a bunch of bloat and protect your SEO methods from prying eyes and tools that can rip all that information in seconds and present pretty reports detailing all your keywords and such.
Anyway, I was told by a Googler that this is cloaking.
How can degrading the page content to only contain what the target device is capable of using be cloaking?
It’s common practice not to send javascript or Flash to devices that can’t understand it, it’s simple content degradation based on the capabilities of the device.
The browser doesn’t do anything with most META tags, except the redirect command, so why bloat your pages sending META keywords and descriptions to anything but a search engine?
Does a browser use NOINDEX? NOFOLLOW? NOARCHIVE? KEYWORDS? META?
Of course not, so why would not giving the browser this information be deemed cloaking?
It’s not sneaky or deceptive, just protecting our investment from prying eyes trying to make a quick buck off our hard work.
What do you think, is Google overstepping here or am I overreacting?
