Cloaking

A dangerous option

You have certainly seen sites from time to time that have high ranking positions, but have little or nothing to do with the keyword they performed well on. Chances are, they employed cloaking for their site.

Cloaking is achieved by running a program at the server level of your site that analyzes visitors before a web page is delivered to them. The page displayed will vary depending on where the visitor is coming from.

Now consider that search engine spiders have IP numbers that can be detected. So, if the program detects a spider is visiting your site, it delivers a highly optimized page for that spider. If, on the other hand, the visitor is not a spider, it delivers the page they want people to actually see.

A deceptive practice

This process is banned by virtually every search engine out there. If you are caught doing this, count on your entire website being completely banned on the engine. You can be caught if a revised spider detects what you are doing, or if a user sees what you are up to and reports you. It is certainly not worth the risk.

 

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