Has anyone tried IP cloaking- not where you jack addresses but when you create special pages (text pages with no images optimized for better rankings on search engines) for search engine spiders? I am looking for a script that would enable me to do this.

One question I do have for anyone who has tried this, if someone used google to search for your site and it was listed, if they clicked on the cached version of your site would they see one that you only wanted the spider to see?

Originally posted by genevaroth
One question I do have for anyone who has tried this, if someone used google to search for your site and it was listed, if they clicked on the cached version of your site would they see one that you only wanted the spider to see? Yes, the google cache would, as you'd expect, show the page that was delivered to google. Of course, you can prevent your site from being cached with a noarchive tag, but that pretty much tells anyone interested that you're cloaking anyway. And there are other ways to check; how effective they might be depends on the sophistication of your cloaking script.

Basically you have to decide how much work it's worth to minimize the chances of being found out, which might depend on what the purpose of your cloaking is to begin with.
I am looking for a script that would enable me to do this. Cloaking scripts range from shareware to those priced at over $1000. Any of the commercial scripts will probably do what they say they'll do... the biggest difference is the quality of support, frequency and accuracty of IP list updates, and whether there's a web-based interface to manage the system vs. whether you have to manually edit the script.