how do you cloak for search engine spiders?

I am in need to do some cloaking for search engine spiders (ethical ones) as I am working on a project and the site has a lot of dup content that cannot be fixed.

How do I go about cloaking so that I can redirect the search engines when they crawl the dup content?

Do I use the IP address of the Googlebot? Or is there another way to identify search engine spiders?

Thanks

 

IP or UA (user-agent).
For such a use, an UA cloaking would be OK.

 

be careful, cloacking is against SE guidelines

 

i sont suggest you to use it because it's against the google quality guide you may be banned because of this

 

If the content is a total duplicate, why not just use a 301 redirect (webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php) to forward spiders AND people to the real/original page?

 

because i work for a big dot com company, things are easier said then done. it's hard to explain unless you have worked at a big corporation. Redirecting all users from the pages with the tracking parameters to the original pages would be an executive decision. Cloaking search engine spiders wouldn't be because it won't affect visitors' experience.

 

So what happens if Google detects the cloaking and bans the site? Somebody is going to get sacked..........

 

We would test the cloaking on another domain/sub-domain before moving forward. Also, having connections with many people at Google will make this less likely to happen.

 

also, if you think about it, the pages are EXACTLY the same and it's not misleading users. For example, NYTimes did it and Google claimed it was okay. In my case, i am just redirecting spiders to a page without a tracking parameters, everything else is exactly the same. So that should not be a problem at all with Google's guidelines

 

If you are just removing the tracking parameters you should be fine. I hadn't really understood the aim of the cloaking.