Cloaking

[I, Brian]

I've noticed that Inivision Power Boards have a habit of hiding forum signature links from the Google search engine.

But - - - if page content is significantly different for human users, and Googlebots, then isn't some form of selective delivery - cloaking - being used?

I appreciate that my understanding of cloaking is pretty limited. Therefore the question I'd like to ask: are Inivision Power Boards, in delivering different content to human users and Googlebots - therefore employing cloaking?

[dannysullivan]

It probably depends on how much you want to split hairs about what cloaking is.

I'm not sure exactly how they are blocking the signatures from appearing, but it's such a specialized case that I doubt any search engine would consider banning the pages under the various cloaking guidelines that are out there. It would be a different case if substantial portions of the forum pages were different from what a human saw.

Also, perhaps the signatures are delivered through things like external JavaScript files. If that were the case, the search engine might not be indexing the text simply because it doesn't choose to pull in such content. In that case, it's not that the site has cloaked content but that the search engine simply isn't recording everything that's offered.

[robwatts]

Personally, I really dont think its any big deal.

Some forum software lets users decide whether they want to display sig links or not. I don't think theres anything sneaky or underhand with a forum admin taking the decision that a bot shouldn't see a particular aspect of a page.

Some might argue that to mask sig links from the bot is actually a *good* thing. As it might even reduce people signing up or posting 'yes me too' type posts, in the belief that they are creating more kw saturated links to whatever it is they are trying to promote.

Besides, sig links are often irrelevant to the topic discussion at hand. Why should a search engine bother with links to phentermine on a page discussing the coefficiency of mild tempered steel? :confused:

[I, Brian]

Thanks for the replies - it's not so much the issue of whether sig links are useful or not, as much as whether Invision Power Boards are setting up a lot of webmasters up for a fall.

Does anyone here have experience with Inivision boards, and whether they supply sig links via other methods, such as JavaScript, or whether this is a specific issue of IP delivery?

Also, there actual guidelines on cloaking?