Cloaking

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Cloaking is a

Cloaking is often used as a spamdexing technique to attempt to sway search engines into giving the site a higher ranking. By the same method, it can also be used to trick search engine users into visiting a site that is substantially different from the search engine description, including delivering pornographic content cloaked within non-pornographic search results.

Cloaking is a form of the doorway page technique.

A similar technique is used on DMOZ web directory, but 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 often based upon the HTTP
  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 web page. 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.

Cloaking versus IP delivery

IP delivery is a crude and unreliable method of determining the language in which to provide content. Many countries and regions are multilingual, or the requestor may be a foreign national. A better method of content negotiation is to examine the client's Accept-Language HTTP header.

See also

• Spamdexing
  • Doorway page
  • Keyword stuffing
  • Link farms
  • Spamdexing
  • URL redirection
• Technology:
  • Content negotiation
  • Geo targeting

References