Internet Cloaking Secrets
Cloaking Demystified
Have you ever done a keyword search on a major search engine, clicked on a site that matched your search, and found that the site that comes up has nothing to do with the keywords you searched on?
How can this happen? Most likely what you ran into was a cloaked web site.
When I first heard about cloaking it seemed mysterious and complicated. However, as I did more and more research I found that it was really quite simple. There are two different types of web site cloaking:
- IP Cloaking: IP Cloaking is based on the IP address of the visitor (Search Engine Spider or Human). When the web page is requested the cloaking software checks the visitor’s IP address. If the IP belongs to a search engine spider, a highly optimized plain HTML keyword intensive page is served to the search engine spider for indexing. If the IP address is “human”, your normal web page is served for viewing.
- User Agent Name Cloaking: Agent name cloaking does exactly the same thing as IP cloaking accept the “user agent name” of the visitor is used to determine if the page request is being made by a search engine spider or a human visitor. Each search engine reports an “agent” name, just as each browser reports a name, if the visitor is a search engine, they get the search engine specific page.
Optimization Nation recommends that you DO NOT cloak, however, should you choose to cloak, do not use a cloaking system based only on user agent name. With user agent name cloaking, it is very easy for a competitor to mimic a search engine and discover that you are using cloaking.
The major advantage of IP cloaking it is more difficult to determine what whether a site is cloaking or not. By its very nature, you do not what anyone to know that your cloaking…of course, that’s why they call it cloaking.
At this time, the effectiveness of cloaking is very minimal. Search engine algorithms are much better at spotting cloaked sites and not including them in their search results. True, every once in a while a cloaked site will sneak through, but they often get knocked down very quickly.
BE SAFE
