All About Cloaking

All About Cloaking

Cloaking is used to serve the search engine bots with content optimized with best results. Some search engine optimizers use it in their promotional campaigns to serve pages optimized for each of the search engines. This can be utilised for Black Hat Practices for quick gains.

In other words Page cloaking is the practice of altering contents of a page depending on the software, method and/or IP address being used to access it.

Cloaking can be used to

• Provide the search engine bots, content optimized for best results.
• Conceal the real keywords and text used for rankings from normal visitors.
• Change the identity of the site depending on who accessed it.
• Protect the server and it's contents from malicious bots or misuse.
• Re-brand shared content depending on the domain name used to access it.
• Bound the options available depending on browser features or capabilities.
• Level out browser inconsistencies.
• Provide relevant information to the user based on Operating System and/or browser.
• Produce a more personalized experience for the visitor.

Cloaking can be done by several methods like:

• Identifying the browser program which is making the request
• Identifying the IP address through which they are connecting from
• Identifying the page through which they are coming from
• Using the session data

By cloaking visitors download time can be reduced by not including the meta tags which generally the visitors don’t see. One can also remove the keyword list from their page which one has made through SEO research. Text can be sent to the search engines rather than the pictures as search engine cannot interpret the images and save time and space.

Generally Cloaking is a NO NO term in SEO as once you get caught for the deed, you may be thrown away from the index and your website will not be crawled. But still many professional take this route to gain rankings quickly and use it as a part of short term strategy to attract traffic.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp