Cloaking Explained

The basic concept of cloaking is to serve different content to different visitors to a web page. In Internet Marketing this means presenting a different content to search engine spiders than to the user. 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, major search engines consider cloaking for deception to be a violation of their guidelines, and therefore, they delist sites when deceptive cloaking is reported. Cloaking is widely considered a black hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO) technique.

Purposes For Cloaking

There are many good reasons for Webmasters to cloak a website. It can be used as a Search Engine Optimization technique, to improve spiderability of a website or to optimizing for browser capabilities. Cloaking is also popular when it comes to subscription management, geotargeting and therefore language management.

Cloak For Search Engine Optimization: Cloaking makes sense for websites without natural popularity in search engines, for example because they lack compelling or rewarding content to rank well. If this is the case Webmasters may be tempted to 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 visitors to consume. As such, black hat SEO practitioners consider cloaking to be an important technique to allow Webmasters to split their efforts and separately target the search engine spiders and human visitors.

Cloak To Improve Spiderability: From a search engines point of view the only legitimate use for cloaking is to deliver content to users that search engines couldn't parse. Until 2006, when a new version af Adobe Flash came out, this was valid for Flash websites. Today there are better methods and cloaking is not necessary anymore.

Cloak To Optimize For Browser Capabilities: There were times when it was necessary for webmasters to optimize websites for various browser capabilities. The browscap.ini file can be used to determine the capabilities of a visitor's browser and cloaking allows to serve a website version to match. Today this is outdated as there are different techniques.

Cloak For Subscription Management: The best example for a company using cloaking for subscription management is the online version of the New York Times. The website requires visitors to have a subscription to view full articles but thanks to cloaking also search engines can spider all the contents. The New York Times grants search engines full access so they can index the full text of articles without paying for it. The New York times has never been banned from search engines because the editor`s intentions are not deceptive. Depending on the intent of the display discrepancy and the strength of the brand of the person or company cloaking, it is considered reasonable or it may get a website banned from a search engine.

Cloaking For Geotargeting & Language Management: Geotargeting is simply used to provide a visitor a website designed for the region the visitor is located at. The nature of IP adresses makes this possible and it is interesting if a Webmaster wants to show users regional news like weather- or local traffic reports. These are also the advantages of cloaking for language management. It is very simple for Webmasters to detect a visitor`s language settings and to display a web page in the appropriate language.

IP-Based Cloaking

Although there are different ways to cloak, like User-Agent-, HTTP_REFERER header- or HTTP Accept-Language header cloaking, the most successful and really working technique is IP-based cloaking.

IP-based cloaking works by delivering content based on the IP addresses of the user visiting a website. An up-to-date database with the IP addresses of all targeted search engine spiders is needed. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page a user sees. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed. This makes cloaking a form of the doorway page technique.

Interesting Cloaking References

• Cloaking Article in Wikipedia
• Cloaking and Redirection: A Preliminary Study
• Black Hat & Spam at Jabz Internet Marketing News

IP-Based Cloaking Tools & Scripts

• Simplified Search Engine Content
• Cloakit
• Fantomaster
• SimpleCloak