Cloaking is where your
"real" home page is hidden from everyone except
the search engine. What we humans get to look at is a
very generic looking page with a nice sales message. There's
often no meta tags or "correct" keyword density,
no apparent reason at all why a particular page should
be positioned so high in the search engines. Chances are
the page is cloaked. The page you get, and the page that
the search engine gets, are two entirely different pages.
There's probably a lot of technology involved but a simple
explanation involves something called an IP address that
looks like this 282.252.273.22 Every computer connected
to the Internet has a distinct name or IP address, that
is how the machines can recognize each other and tell
each other apart. In fact, your domain name has an associated
IP address, we humans use domain names because it's easier
for us to remember names rather than numbers.
When a computer comes to browse a web site, the cloaking
software looks up the IP address to see if it is a known
search engine. If it is, the web page that gets served
to the search engine is fine tuned with just the right
keyword density to reach top positioning within that search
engine. If the IP address is not found on the known search
engine list, the page that gets displayed is just a nice
looking regular page. You and I never get to see what
strategy was used in the html code or what keyword density
was used in the top scoring pages.
Cloaking is becoming more and more common. Many companies
invest thousands of dollars in search engine positioning
and want to protect their secrets. Others are tired of
having their html code stolen. They do all the work to
get top positioning, then some other company comes along
and just takes their code to compete with them in the
search engine battle. |
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