Everyone,

I have a client who was using Flash detection at www.domain.com, so that the home page was hosted at www.domain.com/awful/long/horrible/url.html. Of course, I told them they need to move their home page to www.domain.com. Without consulting me, they used Browserhawk software, so now when I visit, their home page is at www.domain.com/index.asp?bhcp=1.

When I complained and started digging into what they had done, I found that Browserhawk does browser sniffing and serves up www.domain.com to the search engines instead (with the same content as I would see, just a shorter URL). This sure looks like cloaking to me, which I avoid like the plague.

Anyone have any experience with Browserhawk or any thoughts on this?

Thanks,
Stacy Williams
Prominent Placement, Inc.

Browserhawk is not cloaking software but a server component used to detect browsers and browser versions to serve adjusted versions of your code to different browser versions. Below you'll find a link that explain a bit more about what it does:

http://www.15seconds.com/component/pg000307.htm

Sounds like cloaking? Well, thats the problem about such techniques - the same technique can be used for several things. However, Browserhawk is, I must say, not a very good solution if you really do want to cloaking. Professional cloakers usually use a combination of (at least) spidering agent names and IPs. Browserhawk only look at agent names and only detect browsers - not spiders.

Off course, this can be used to serve up one page to all normal browsers (based on Browsehawks detection of known browsers and versions) but it's just not a very good way.

If all you do is change the URL-format (not the content) it is not cloaking, as usually defined. In fact, Google actually reccomend this exact technique to get around session ID's: Identify their spider and leave out the session IDs. From what you told about the case it dosen't sound like cloaking to me.

Anyone have any experience with Browserhawk or any thoughts on this?I use it and Countryhawk on a few sites. The url string used to be even worse containing every param you chose. Even that didn't deter a crawler. If it messes with the url it is only removing its parameters so IMO, no harm no foul. If it's removing other parameters still the same as re-writing a url just a different method. To those who see this and decide to look further I wouldn't advise using it in the way some of their documentation suggests. I would agree with Mikkal on the cloaking angle. I will say it is great for writing content on the fly which is dependent on browser settings such as Br version, cookies, JS off, DHTML, Flash and connection speed.