I'd like to hear people's ideas about IP spoofing. How legal is it? How moral is it? How ethical is it? I'm looking forward to hearing all input.
Actually, it's not difficult to do.. But just because one CAN do something, does not mean that one SHOULD do something. Thanks for your input. I've read in various places that IP spoofing is not really spamming but I wanted to get the opinion of my peers.
I think it's a legit question. I know NOTHING about it, but it's an interesting topic. IMO. I suppose I could do a GOOGLE search to find out more OR watch this thread.
neterslandreau, it is impossible. You can mangle IP headers to change the source IP, but the reply will be sent to the spoofed IP, and not your real IP. So technically, I guess it is possible, but relatively useless, since it only works one-way.
After reading DomainLoot's response, I did a little research and realized that I used the wrong term to describe what I meant. IP spoofing is masking your IP. I guess what I really meant to inquire about was IP redirects.. Thanks for helping me refine my question.
Finally someone who knows how to read minds! Forgive me for never knowing what I'm talking about.. or at least being able to share it with others.
No problem OK, so here are a few things you need to know about cloaking. It's not actually all that easy to produce good cloaked sites without a heck of a lot of time invested in developing the actual architecture of the content you want to use. It's also not a magic formula for getting #1's accross the board for uber competitive phrases. It's great at driving traffic for niche phrases though (3+ words usually). It's easy to get caught if you don't update your list of SE IP's on a VERY regular basis (It should be daily really). This is really hard to do unless you are using a script that can manage this for you (Of course this is based on you cloaking using IP's). Cloaking is certianly not ethical SEO (Although frankly if it converts I couldn't care less about ethics). There are some good bits of software out there to help you cloak (Like http://www.searchenginecloaker.com), but you really do have to bare in mind that it takes a LOT of time to build up cloaker templates that won't get cought for dup content. IF you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.
Actually, without knowing and without realizing it, I've already developed many of the 'pieces' of the puzzle that are needed to do this, i.e. a page generator and a script that continually updates the IP's of the bots. My sites are quite niche so that is not a problem. Uh oh.. I sure hope my log parser doesn't have any bugs What about user agent cloaking? I try to be as ethical as I can in all of my activities because I know I have to answer for everything I do. I guess Ill have to wrestle with this question a bit longer. Thanks SEBasic. I'm sure I'll have more questions as I develop this thing further. I've been programming for years but only been dabbling in SEO for a couple of months and a lot of it is still PFM to me.
Hey, if you're developing something new and need any input, I'd be only too pleased to offer suggestions / help with beta testing RE: User agent cloaking... Yep, that can be done too with no problem, but personally, I'd always go for the IP route as it is more secure IMO. Keep me informed with how it's going if you don't mind. Always interested in hearing about / playing with new tools Cheers
Looking at my database, I discovered something interesting: Googlebot and Mediapartners-Google sometimes share IP's. This would indicate to me that UA cloaking may be more secure. This is a preliminary finding and by no means definitive.
If you want to know about cloaking then really, the only place to go is the legendary Fantomaster http://fantomaster.com/
It's not a question of need. It's a question of whether or not I'm able to do it. It's kind of like my tracking tool: It's not needed (Shawn's tracker provides the same info), but it's been a lot of fun to develop.
Cloaking is supposed to be useful if you have a primarily graphical site (flash and such) so you can provide search engines a textual version of the site. I am not sure if it works that way in practice, but that is the theory.