Page Cloaking - To Cloak or Not to Cloak.
By Sumantra Roy
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However, while this is the simplest way to implement a cloaking script, it is also the least safe. It is pretty easy to fake the User-Agent variable, and hence, someone who wants to see the optimized pages that are being delivered to different search engines can easily do so.
ii) The second and more complicated way is to use I.P. (Internet Protocol) based cloaking. This involves the use of an I.P. database which contains a list of the I.P. addresses of all known search engine spiders. When a visitor (a search engine or a human) requests a page, the cloaking script checks the I.P. address of the visitor. If the I.P. address is present in the I.P. database, the cloaking script knows that the visitor is a search engine and delivers the page optimized for that search engine. If the I.P. address is not present in the I.P. database, the cloaking script assumes that a human has requested the page, and delivers the page which is meant for human visitors.
Although more complicated than User-Agent based cloaking, I.P. based cloaking is more reliable and safe because it is very difficult to fake I.P. addresses.
Now that you have an idea of what cloaking is all about and how it is implemented, the question arises as to whether you should use page cloaking. The one word answer is "NO". The reason is simple: the search engines don't like it, and will probably ban your site from their index if they find out that your site uses cloaking. The reason that the search engines don't like page cloaking is that it prevents them from being able to spider the same page that their visitors are going to see. And if the search engines are prevented from doing so, they cannot be confident of delivering relevant results to their users. In the past, many people have created optimized pages for some highly popular keywords and then used page cloaking to take people to their real sites which had nothing to do with those keywords. If the search engines allowed this to happen, they would suffer because their users would abandon them and go to another search engine which produced more relevant results.
Of course, a question arises as to how a search engine can detect whether or not a site uses page cloaking. There are three ways by which it can do so:
i) If the site uses User-Agent cloaking, the search engines can simply send a spider to a site which does not report the name of the search engine in the User-Agent variable. If the search engine sees that the page delivered to this spider is different from the page which is delivered to a spider which reports the name of the search engine in the User-Agent variable, it knows that the site has used page cloaking.
ii) If the site uses I.P. based cloaking, the search engines can send a spider from a different I.P. address than any I.P. address which it has used previously. Since this is a new I.P. address, the I.P. database that is used for cloaking will not contain this address. If the search engine detects that the page delivered to the spider with the new I.P. address is different from the page that is delivered to a spider with a known I.P. address, it knows that the site has used page cloaking.
iii) A human representative from a search engine may visit a site to see whether it uses cloaking. If she sees that the page which is delivered to her is different from the one being delivered to the search engine spider, she knows that the site uses cloaking.
Hence, when it comes to page cloaking, my advice is simple: don't even think about using it.
Article by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. To have Sumantra's company place your site at the top of the search engines, go to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?4021 For more advice on how you can take your web site to the top of the search engines, subscribe to his FREE newsletter by going to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?4021&newsletter.htm
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