| There are many techniques of website optimization for search engine and placement in search results but there are a few SEO practitioners who like to take the easy way out. They indulge in dubious SEO practices such as cloaking. Earlier it worked fine into tricking the search engines. However, with advancing technology, search engines smartened up against cloaking and now any website using it may face grave punishments like a lifetime domain and IP ban.
Getting top ten ranking in search engine is a Herculean task and needs a persistent effort. However, people have devices some unethical shortcut ways. Cloaking, also known as IP Delivery or Food ../script, is one of them. In this case instead of creating generic common pages for all the search engines as well as the website visitors, separate simple, and completely search engine optimized pages for each search engine are created. These pages are mainly text based and are specifically optimized for a particular search engine and placement in its search results. They do not have elements like dynamic content, frames, XML, or Java etc. that do not get spiders, attention.
Besides, these specific search engine optimized pages a separate set of pages is made available for the website visitors. Therefore, the spiders see different web pages than what the website visitors would. This decreases search relevancy in many cases, which is not acceptable to the search engines. Therefore, they have banned cloaking from their networks. You may wonder how the website ../script gets to know which page to display. This is simple. The ../script detects the search engine by its IP address. So, the page created for that particular search engine and placement is displayed. If the IP address is not recognized by the ../script, it will automatically display the generic page designed for the website visitors. Cloaking helps you get the best of both the worlds.
Though cloaking is not used by all the SEO professionals for the good of your effort of website optimization .However, there are still some of them who want to deliver quick and easy results via short cut method, especially if the client is from a very competitive domain and has a lot of not so search engine friendly elements like dynamic content, frames, XML, or Java etc. on their website.
Search engines, especially Google imposes heavy penalties on website that it perceives as Spam. Now, cloaking is being considered as Spam and one of the biggest SEO mistakes you can commit.
There are many ways to tell which web page has been cloaked for website optimization .All you got to do is compare the meta tags, page size and a few other attributes of pages that appear in the search engine results to the pages you finally receive.
One very good use of cloaking for website marketers is that it can help keep competitors at bay. Cloaked pages will hide your HTML code so the spies won’t be able to see what tactics you have used to appease search engine for placement.
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