For the cloaking used in science fiction, see invisibility.

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 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 some search engines threaten to ban sites using cloaking. Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ... An example of how an object could appear to be invisible through the use of mirrors Invisibility is the state of an object which cannot be seen. ... Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings, and could be considered a subset of search engine marketing. ... See WebCrawler for the specific search engine of that name. ... An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a unique number that devices use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a computer network utilizing the Internet Protocol standard (IP). ... HTTP (for HyperText Transfer Protocol) is the primary method used to convey information on the World Wide Web. ... The success of the Google search engine was mainly due to its powerful PageRank algorithm and its simple, easy-to-use interface. ... // == Macromedia Flash == ==]] Using Macromedia Flash 8 (bundled in Studio 8) in Windows XP. Maintainer: Adobe Systems (formerly Macromedia) Latest release: 8 / September 30th, 2005 OS: Windows (no native Windows XP Professional x64 Edition support), Mac OS X, Linux (i386 only, via wine [1]) Use: Multimedia Content Creator License: Proprietary Website... It has been suggested that Made For AdSense be merged into this article or section. ...

Cloaking is a form of the doorway page technique. Doorway pages are web pages that are created to rank high in search engine results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending you to a different page. ...

A similar technique is also used on the Open Directory Project web directory. It differs in several ways from search engine cloaking: The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as DMoz (from Directory. ... Web directory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ...

• It is intended to fool human editors, rather than computer search engine spiders.
• The decision to cloak or not is based upon the HTTP referrer, which tells the 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 webpage. 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.

In more recent times several well known and well respected sites have taken up cloaking to deliver personalised content to their regular customers. In fact, many of the top 1000 sites - including household names like Amazon (amazon.com) - actively cloak. None of these have been banned from search engines purely because of cloaking. Referer is a common misspelling of the word referrer, so common in fact that it made it into the official specification of HTTP - the communication protocol of the world wide web. ... A Uniform Resource Locator, URL (spelled out as an acronym, not pronounced as earl), or Web address, is a standardized address name layout for resources (such as documents or images) on the Internet (or elsewhere). ... Amazon. ...

Increasingly, for a page without natural popularity due to compelling or rewarding content to rank well in the search engines, Webmasters must 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 endusers to consume. As such, cloaking is an important technique to allow Webmasters to split their efforts and separately target the search engine spiders and endusers. As with anything, this technique can be used responsibly, or less so.

Cloaking and IP Delivery

There is a fundamental distinction between cloaking and IP delivery. With cloaking, search engines and people never see the other's pages, whereas, with other uses of IP delivery, both search engines and people see the same pages. One use of IP delivery is to determine the requestor's location, and deliver content accordingly. It is IP delivery, but it isn't cloaking. Google does this when delivering their AdWords and AdSense advertisements. Cloaking delivers different pages to the search engines than to people, and each never sees the other's pages.

See also

• Doorway page
• Keyword stuffing
• Link farms
• Spamdexing

Doorway pages are web pages that are created to rank high in search engine results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending you to a different page. ... Keyword stuffing is considered to be an unethical Search engine optimization (SEO) technique. ... On the World Wide Web, a link farm is any group of web pages that all hyperlink to every other page in the group. ... It has been suggested that Made For AdSense be merged into this article or section. ...

External links

• What Search Engines See Isn't Always What You Get
  • In Defense of Search Engine Cloaking, a response to the above article
  • Search Engine Cloaking: The Controversy Continues, a response to In Defense of Search Engine Cloaking
• SEO Black Hat on Cloaking Cloaking discussed by a search engine spammer.
• Cloaking and Ethics A realistic view of cloaking and ethics.
• Baoning Wu and Brian D. Davison: "Cloaking and Redirection: A Preliminary Study". Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web, Chiba, Japan, 2005.
• Apache Information Disclosure Issues or, "How to detect cloaking"