Search Engine Cloaking

October 13, 2007 – 1:21 pm

Getting the best ranking from a search engine may be a frustrating experience if you believe your web site should be on the first page if not at the top. There are a variety of ways of increasing your ranking, or optimizing your website in order to get the spider to generate a good ranking. Many are legitimate and clever. But there are ways of fooling the search engine.

Cloaking

One way of fooling the search engine spider is by cloaking the web page with thousands of pages just for the spider. Cloaking is considered a black hat activity. In order to increase the popularity of a website, some web designers will design pages solely for the use of search engines.  The pages contain many keywords and are otherwise made to look search engine friendly. The spider will loop around until it hits all of the pages.  The user sees one thing, but the spider sees another. Because the actual user would find the website difficult to interpret, the webmaster redirects the user to the actual site. With cloaking you get a lot of traffic, more listings, this is done faster, and better rankings for targeted keywords. So that is cloaking and why it is done. Let’s look at some products.

Products

There are a variety of products available that perform cloaking operations for a web site.

One such site is Fantomaster.com. It lists a variety of different ways that search engine optimization can occur, including cloaking techniques. One interesting link they provide allows you to find domain names that have a high link popularity but have expired. You find the domain name that you are interested in and purchase it. Your domain name, while not guaranteed to be at the top has a high chance since it will already appear in the search engines index.

Cloak Link

One site specializes in hiding your affiliate links. At www.cloaklink.com they have the software that is designed to do what the other cloaking software does, improve your ranking, give better results, but it also is designed to protect your affiliate links. Stealing affiliate links commissions is easy to do; the link traffic can be redirected to another site, and so will the commissions earned. This site presents software that can be used to prevent such hijacking.

How cloaking is done

There are two main ways of cloaking. One is “IP delivery”, where the IP addresses of the requestor is recognized at the server location then appropriate web pages are presented. In this format, the spider and the viewer see the same page. In the delivery of the web page, the IP address location is recognized, so the appropriate web page is then delivered.

Another cloaking technique is User-Agent delivery.  The User-agent contains the application name, version, host operating system, and language. If the spider is identified as the user a server-side script is run. It presents a different version of the web page. One version presents content for the spider, but a different one is presented for the user.

Search Engines Companies and Cloaking

How do Search Engines respond if they know that you are cloaking? The result can be severe. First of all crawlers won’t index pages if it looks like there is a session IDs located in their URLs. If they determine that you are cloaking the search engine company can de index your site; permanently. The point that search engines find annoying, to put it mildly, is to hijack the spider and generate results that are not true to the web site. The spider is supposed to find the relevant content of the site; cloaking information on the site violates the deliverable product that the search engine company is trying to create. If you use it, you may lose it.

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