why cloaking

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 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.

For more information u can refer this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking

 

First off cloaking can be used in ways which are not necessarily bad. Think about this, you have a site which has loads of content that you want the engines to index, but you want your visitors to pay or sign up for memebership first before they have access to it. What do you do? You show one version to the search engine and one version to the visitors, then redirect them once they have paid or signed up etc.

Hope that helps

 

That's not cloaking - that's denying entry.

 

The New York Times actually does what Seog176 mentioned and it is in fact a form of cloaking because the engines see one thing while the visitor will see another. It will deny the user entrance to the SERP you clicked on prompting for your login information, however I have read that that form of cloaking is ok as long as the you informed Google on your intentions. I will have to find again where I read that in the past.

 

One of the great SEO companies in California, http://www.seoinc.com/ is a PR0. Does this tell you anything?

How long has it been now 9 months, a year? And maybe for ever.

 

i have personally used cloaking a bit in the past however only to another page on my site. Lets say i have a page on the site about 'stresss information' obviously i will want to seo that page and make it user friendly, however i will also want to rank for all the misspellings of the main topics listed on that page but i do not want to use misspellings on my site as this will look unprofessional. In this case i have a few times made a few 'cloaked' pages seo'ed for the misspellings and when the user clicks on them they are taken to the proper page with information on.

I have run this for well over a year without any issue at all; yes whilst it i accept it is cloaking it is also giving the user what they want. If done like this i think doorway/cloaked pages can be an addition to a site however they have gotten a bad name from spammers after a quick profit by ranking high and redirecting people to what they were not looking for

 

Cheers SEMspot, thats exactly what I was refering to.

It seems to me that certain search engines will over look some forms of cloaking sometimes (like geoIP based, membership sites etc) but when it suits them, they will ban it, as they explicitly state this in their guidelines.

In essence the rule that I follow is cloak if you need to for what ever reason, but remember that you are playing with fire, so the search engines reserve the right to burn your site whenever. I have used it, but wouldn't use it on a valuable domain.

 

Basically Cloaking is a technique in which the content presented to the search engines is different from that present to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on IP address of the user requesting the page. When a user is defined as search engine spider, a server side script delivers a different version of web page. It is use to deceive the search engine. Actually what happens it is a CGI script which reads the IP address of the requester against the IP address of the SE spiders. If no match is found then requester is identified as “human”. The point is that highly optimized web pages are served to SE while human visitors get a different web page from the same url.

 

A brief idea about cloaking It is basically a technique in which the content presented to the search engines is different from that present to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on IP address of the user requesting the page. When a user is defined as search engine spider, a server side script delivers a different version of web page. It is use to deceive the search engine. Actually what happens it is a CGI script which reads the IP address of the requester against the IP address of the SE spiders. If no match is found then requester is identified as “human”. The point is that highly optimized web pages are served to SE while human visitors get a different web page from the same url.

I hope it will help you.

Thanks
Angel