Hiding and Cloaking
Thursday, February 15th, 2007After the launch of the new Lily O’Briens site, designed by Magico a bit of a discussion arose around the site’s design (overall good) and specifically the SEO aspects of the site.
Richard Hearne of the SEO blog RedCardinal in his blog post Blind People Can’t Eat Chocolate highlighted that the site will not display anything in browsers it does not recognise.
In a follow-up post Richard reveals that for a period of time after the site going online the Google Bot was also blocked from the site.
Previous to Richard’s post (but after the site had been edited to accept GoogleBot) I set off to do a bit of investigating on what User-Agents Lily O’Briens would accept.
I hacked together, and then tidied up Hide-my-UA which allows you to choose a User-Agent to “pretend” to be and then browse around a site. Comments and suggestions welcome.
