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Cloaking
Online Advertising
Cloaking
Page hijacking
Cloaking is a
search engine optimization technique in which the content presented
to the
search engine spider is different from that presented to the users'
browser; this is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or
the User-Agent HTTP header of whatever is requesting the page. The only
legitimate uses for cloaking used to be for delivering content to users
that search engines couldn't parse, like Macromedia Flash. However, cloaking is often used as a
spamdexing technique, to try to trick search engines into giving the
relevant site a higher ranking; it can also be used to trick search
engine users into visiting a site based on the search engine description
which site turns out to have substantially different - or even
pornographic - content. For this reason some search engines threaten to
ban sites using cloaking.
Cloaking is a form of the
doorway
page technique.
A similar technique is also used on the
Open Directory Project web
directory. It differs in several ways from search engine cloaking:
- It is intended to fool human editors, rather than computer search engine
spiders.
- The decision to cloak or not is based upon the HTTP
referrer, which tells the URL
of the page on which a user clicked a link to get to the page. Some cloakers
will give the fake page to anyone who comes from a web directory website,
since directory editors will usually examine sites by clicking on links that
appear on a directory webpage. Other cloakers give the fake page to everyone
except those coming from a major search engine; this makes it harder
to detect cloaking, while not costing them many visitors, since most people
find websites by using a search engine.
In more recent times several well known and well respected sites have taken
up cloaking to deliver personalised content to their regular customers. In fact,
many of the top 1000 sites - including household names like Amazon
(amazon.com) - actively cloak. None of these have been banned from search
engines purely because of cloaking.
Increasingly, for a page without natural popularity due to compelling or
rewarding content to rank well in the search engines, Webmasters must design
pages solely for the search engines. This results in pages with too many
keywords and other factors that might be search engine "friendly", but make the
pages difficult for actual endusers to consume. As such, cloaking is an
important technique to allow Webmasters to split their efforts and separately
target the search engine spiders and endusers. As with anything, this technique
can be used responsibly, or less so.
See also
External links
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This guide is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.
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