Search Engine Optimization - Profit thru Cloaking?
Cloaking, Spoofing… what ever you want to call it; to SEO professionals, it means the same thing. Cloaking is the practice of showing different content to search engines than what you show to your users. When a regular user click into your site, the site’s normal page is shown. However, when a search engine spider makes the same page request, a special page that has been created for the engine is returned. The normal page is hidden from the search engine. This is cloaking.
The usual purposes of cloaking are to hide the HTML code of high ranking pages from people, so that it can’t be stolen, and to provide search engine spiders with search engine optimized pages that wouldn’t look particularly good in browsers.
There are three ways of cloaking. One is “IP delivery”, where the IP addresses of search engine spiders are recognized at the server and handled accordingly; another is “User-Agent delivery”, where the spiders’ User-Agents are recognised at the server and handled accordingly, and the third is a combination of the two.
How search engine cloaking works
Every website contains one or more ordinary webpages. For every page in the site that needs to be cloaked, another page is created that is designed to rank highly in a search engine. If more than one search engine is being targeted, then a page is created for each engine, because different engines have different criteria for ranking pages, and pages need to be created to match each engine’s criteria. For example, a site may have 5 actual pages that a user will ever see. However, this same site could have 1000s of pages that are cloaked, point to these 5 actual pages. The benefit here would be that a 5 page website could have 1000s of pages indexed in the search engines.
The search engine pages may be totally different to their ‘normal’ equivalents, or they may only be slightly different, or anywhere in between. For instance, a page may rank highly in a particular engine if it starts out with an additional paragraph of keyword-stuffed text, so a page like that is created for the engine.
Dynamic sites work in the same way, except that the normal pages, and the search engines pages, are created dynamically. The search engine pages could even be static, while the normal pages are dynamic.
Is cloaking ethical?
Some people say that cloaking is “unethical” and look down on people who do it. Others say that everything’s fair in love and war (business being war) and whatever is done to get ahead should not be left “off the table.”
The only reason we really see cloaking as unethical is when:
- Visitors are sent to a site that is off-topic from what they are searching for
- SEO companies use cloaking for clients without their knowledge
- SEO companies use cloaking for clients without fully informing them of the risks
Now don’t confuse the word “ethical” with “smart.” We just think “Unethical” is a little to harsh a word. We generally don’t think that cloaking is all that smart.
So what are the risks of cloaking for SEO?
Cloaking can get you banned from the search engines. There are many cases where websites that are utilizing cloaking techniques get banned. We have seen websites get banned in as little as a month and have seen websites that have been using cloaking for 10 years remain at the top of the search results. That’s the risk. Can you put a percentage or define the chance of getting caught? Not really. The technologies that are used for cloaking are undetectable from a search engine spiders point of view.
So how does one get caught cloaking?
Google, in particular, allows users to report suspected search engine spamming. If a Google employee takes the time to compare the information being recorded by their spiders against an actual human look at the site, the site can be banned. We believe that the Google toolbar, used by webmasters utilizing cloaking, may be being used to detect different delivered pages. If you are allowing the search engines to cache the results of their spiders, the the cached version will not be the same as the visited version. So, there are a lot of ways to get caught. Generally by a human reporting the incident after taking the time to do the manual research necessary.
So why do it?
From now until the end of time, people will be searching for an easy fix to any problem. Cloaking, done with today’s dynamic and database driven cloaking engines, can give you a 1000 page website, optimized for virtually any niche, in very little time. There is money to be made and cloaking is a powerful tool when used with other strategies like link building to cloaked pages.
So should you do it?
Nobody here will tell you whether you should or should not use cloaking as part of your SEO and internet marketing strategy. Just know that, used by itself, cloaking is a waste of time. In the end, nothing really comes all that easy and value cannot be faked. A site with little or no value will never give you the results you need to succeed no matter how many ways you subvert the search results.
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