Frequently Asked Questions - What is Cloaking?
Cloaking is the process of serving different pages to search engine
spiders and human visitors. There are several ways to do this, the most
effective of which is IP delivery. Cloaking software that uses IP delivery
to cloak pages are very sophisticated programs. Here is a simplified
explanation on how these cloaking programs work.
When an entity (search engine spider, human visitor or some other Internet
robot, requests a page, the cloaking software compares the IP address
of the requesting entity to a list of known IP addresses for search
engine spiders. If the IP address matches one on the list, it serves
a particular page to the spider. This page is normally optimized to
score well in the search engines in order to achieve high rankings.
If the IP address does not match one on the list, the requesting entity
is normally served the actual page or redirected to a page appropriate
for human visitors.
The real power of these highly sophisticated cloaking programs is the
list of IP addresses. Without regular updates, it will become outdated
very quickly, rendering the software virtually useless with a few months.
If you intend to purchase cloaking software, be sure that you get regular
IP address updates.
One final thing you should know about cloaking. The search engines
don't like cloaking. Especially Google. Most of them will take action
against a site that it finds is cloaking, including banning the site.
The reason for this is that the search engines feel that they should
be served the same page that a human visitor sees. Some search engines
also feel that webmasters that use cloaking are spamming the index.
While we feel that this is not necessarily so because of the high cost
of these programs, the search engines' point of view does have merit.
A few of the search engines have stated that there are specific instances
where cloaking is not "evil," such as dynamic content or Flash
sites, but they also state that you should contact them to develop a
mutually beneficial situation. In any event, the search engines have
clearly stated that they don't like cloaking and that they will take
action against sites that they determine to be cloaking.
We no longer use or advocate the use of cloaking software. If you are
convinced that cloaking is the only way to go, we will point you in
the right direction and wish you good luck.
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