Cloaking Definition

This a technique used in search engine optimization (SEO) to deliver to the search engine spider, content that differs from the one delivered to the users browser. It is achieved through presenting content which depends on the IP addresses or User-Agent HTTP header of the person who requests the page.

A Little More on What is Cloaking

After a user gets identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script usually presents a copy of the web page which has the content lacking on the visible page, or which is available but cannot be searched, every time that a user is recognized as a search engine spider. Cloaking can be used to trick search engines into showing a page that would not have been displayed initially. It can also be a meaningful technique of notifying search engines of content they would have failed to find since it is rooted in non-textual containers or some components of Adobe Flash. However, better methods of accessibility such as progressive enhancement have been developed, and this has made cloaking irrelevant for regular SEO. Usually, cloaking is used as a web spam technique of coaxing search engines into providing a site with a higher ranking. Using this method, cloaking can be operated to deceive users into visit sites which are different from how they are described in the search engine. For example, the delivery of pornographic content which is hidden in non-pornographic search results. Cloaking is a type of a doorway page technique. Such a technique is also used on the DMOZ web directory although it is different from the search engine cloaking in some ways such as:

• It is designed to fool human editors and not computer search engine spiders
• Usually, the cloaking decision is based on the HTTP referrer, the Visitor's IP or the user agent but some more developed techniques can depend on the behavior analysis of the client after several page requests. After a user clicks a link on a page, the referrer communicates to its URL to get to the page. Various cloakers provide the fake page to people who visit from a web directory website because the directory editors normally examine sites through clicking on links appearing on a directory web page. Others dont provide the fake page to people coming from a major search engine, and this ensures that detecting cloaking difficult and does not cost a large number of visitors because a majority of people find websites through the use of a search engine.

Blackhat Techniques

Webmasters develop pages specifically for the search engines and these pages come without natural popularity because of lack of compelling content to rank them well in the search engines. This gives rise to pages having numerous keywords and other factors which might be search engine friendly but that would make the pages hard for consumption by real visitors. Due to this, cloaking is considered an essential technique by the black hat SEO practitioners since it allows the webmasters to target the human visitors and the search engine spiders separately. Cloaking ensures a high user experience and at the same time satisfies the required keyword concentration for ranking in a search engine. In Mosaic cloaking, dynamic pages are built as tiles of content, and only sections of the pages are changed, and this simultaneously reduces the existing contrast between the cloaked page and the friendly page and ensures an increase in the capacity for the targeted content delivery to different spiders and human visitors.

Cloaking Versus IP delivery

IP delivery is a mild variant of cloaking in which different content is provided based on the requester's IP address. In cloaking, there is no time that the search engines and people see each the pages of each other while in IP delivery, the search engines and people can see similar pages. This technique is popular in graphics-heavy sites that dont have much textual content to be analyzed by spiders. IP delivery is used to identify the location of a requestor and then delivering content which is written specifically for that country. This is not cloaking in the real sense. IP delivery is a rudimentary and an undependable way of identifying the language to be used in providing content. This is because either most countries are multi-lingual or the requestor is a foreigner. A reliable method of identifying content negotiation is inspecting the Accept-Language HTTP header of the client. A majority of sites have been taking up IP delivery in personalizing content for their regular customers. Some top sites such as Amazon are active users of IP delivery, and none of them have been banned from search engines since they don't have deceptive intent.