Cloaking: Search Engines Shift Gears
As recently as last year, search engine representatives were unclear or did not seem to care much about the search engine marketing application referred to as cloaking, IP delivery or stealth scripts.
At one point, I remember thinking many people working at major search engines must simply have no idea what cloaking is and how it works. If they had, they wouldn’t have waited so long to take action against it.
Cloaking is a search engine optimization strategy in which a Web page
URL has several documents associated with it, one for each of the major
search engines and a different document for end users.
With cloaking, an individual search engine spider sees only the page tailored to optimize rankings for that search engine.
Visitors entering a Web site from search engine results see a page designed for end users because these click-throughs are URL independent, that is, the link from search engine results refers visitors to the URL of the site and not to the page the search engine has cached, which is the page optimized for its indexing process.
Cloaking is a program installed on the Web server that monitors URL requests. These requests must contain the IP address of the requester so the Web server knows where to send the requested page.
By comparing the IP address of the requesting machine to a database of IP addresses of search engine spiders, the cloaking program determines whether a visitor is a search engine spider then decides which search engine spider it is.
The server sends the page designed for the spider it detects or the page designed for end users if a search engine spider is not detected.
Cloaking allows you to tailor Web pages for individual spiders and to score top positions in multiple search engines using one URL.
It’s difficult for a single page to rank well with all search engines because each search engine uses a different algorithm to rank Web pages.
Hiding HTML code from prying eyes is the main reason people give for
using cloaking. When sites achieve top search engine positions, competitors
for the same keyword analyze the pages to discover why. Cloaking can keep
important optimization strategies — such as keyword
frequency, keyword placement and word count — hidden from competitors.
Though cloaking can keep competitors from some of your search engine optimization strategies, it can also be used to hide other things.
People can steal your site’s content and hide it behind a stealth script.
This nasty form of theft, referred to as page jacking, was exposed in a publicized
event on Search Engine Watch.
But the major downside that may have you thinking twice about cloaking: Major search engines are finally on to it.
On the I-Search
Discussion List, Marshall Simmonds, manager of Search Engine Relations
at About.com, posted conversations he had with representatives from AltaVista,
Inktomi and Northern Light. Sentiments expressed were simple and to the
point: Web sites that cloak will be permanently banned from their search
engine databases.
Google states its policy in a FAQ.
It all sounds like deterrent language to me.
Many people reported in I-Search that they achieve better positioning if they simply optimize normally and use techniques that are impossible with cloaked pages.
At several recent conferences, I’ve had the chance to speak frankly with
search engine representatives. They generally agree you should provide
quality content to your users and worry about spider-friendly design over
positioning alone. This is a long-term strategy that will survive any spam shakeout.
Detlev Johnson is vice president of technology at Position Technologies, an Inktomi partner and maker of advanced search engine optimization (SEO) tools for webmasters and major online agencies.
Acknowledged as one of the top five search engine optimization experts in the world, he speaks and moderates search engine discussions at leading Internet conferences worldwide, most recently in Dallas, London, Boston, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Berlin, Stockholm and Gothenburg, Sweden, and Sydney, Australia.
He moderates the popular I-Search Digest, a vital SEO resource covering every aspect of Internet search engines and the webmaster tactics that accommodate them. He writes for leading Internet publishers and travels the world consulting with companies on SEO.
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