Devendra's SEO Diary

What is Cloaking in SEO technique

1. Cloaking is a technique that is used to display different pages to the search engine spiders than the ones normal visitors see.

2. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of whatever is requesting the page.

With cloaking, one can create two sets of pages:

1. The first for search engine spiders,

2. The second for regular human visitors.

This enables retaining the good look and feel of the site for humans, while still being able to show highly optimized pages to the spiders and thus generate nice amounts of traffic from the search engines. Cloaking also prevents humans from seeing what kind of optimization techniques you are using and stealing your optimized.

When a person requests the page of a particular URL from the website, the site's normal page is returned, but when a search engine spider makes the same request, a special page that has been created for the engine is returned, and the normal page for the URL is hidden from the engine - it is cloaked.

There are three ways of cloaking

1. One is "IP delivery", Where the IP addresses of spiders are recognized at the server and handled accordingly.

2. Another is "User-Agent delivery", where the spiders' User-Agents are recognized at the server and handled accordingly.

3. And the third is a combination of the two.

Posted By Devendra Prakash Jaiswal
11:29 PM