Cloaking:

As search engine optimization started evolving and search engines became more and more intelligent, webmasters came up with many techniques to rank their sites on search engines. Cloaking is one of those techniques. It is very difficult and time consuming to make a web site both user friendly as well as search engine friendly. So webmasters came up with an idea of Cloaking. In cloaking webmasters delivers one page to search engine for indexing while serving an entirely different page to everyone else. Cloaking is the process of serving different versions of a page based upon identifiable information about the user. Often, pages are based upon Agent name and/or IP address (isp host).

There is no as such clear view that whether cloaking is ethical or unethical. But anyways it is tricking spiders and any attempt to trick a search engine is considered to be spam. Hence cloaking technique is not regularly practiced. A simple way to see if a web page is using a cloaking technique is to look at the cache. Google has a link called Cached next to almost every search result. The cache shows the web page that was indexed by search engine. If a web page that you see in the SERPs differs from cached version, then there’s possibility that the website is using cloaking technique.

As we all know, people want to make web sites user centric. They want their site to be beautiful, attractive and interactive enough to engage visitors. Certainly this enhances user experience. But this does not serve the optimization purpose. So to optimize such a site webmasters use cloaking technique. The few factors are explained bellow, which makes a webmaster to think of cloaking.

Use of flash/splash/ Videos:

HTML days are gone and flash days are in! Many of the sites are build using flash, which is totally no no for search engines. So no plain text and not even flash on the site??? The solution is to create simple HTML text document for search engines and flash pages for visitors. Just recently Google has started to index flash pages but rests of the SEs don’t do that.

Continue ...