Cloaking Techniques

Most search engines go through contents of pages that are listed with them and rank them on the basis of relevancy of content to the keyword. Many sites try to play around with this guideline by showing one page to humans and some different page to search engine bots. The content that comes up when search engine bots are visiting the homepage is designed with the main aim of getting high rankings. While the page, that is visible to human searching the keyword is targeting sales. One example can be showing crawling page to search engine bots and flash site to actual users. The main advantage of this technique is getting high number of visitors on the home page and then converting them for sales. Although this process leads to high sales, it is not advocated by search engines and many times, they ban this type of practice. Reason for such a ban is misleading of users; they reach your home page on the basis of keyword search and get to see some different marketing page. This miscommunication can harm impression of search engine to probable users as in the future they can avoid the search engine itself. Hence to keep their reputation intact such cloaking practices are strictly prohibited. Many search engines regularly conduct checks to catch sites using cloaking.

There are many techniques of using cloaking. Some most prominent are listed below:

JavaScript Redirects:

These are most used cloaking techniques. In this type of cloaking, there is Java script link kept on the landing page. When search engine bots visit the page they are not able to go inside this link. But when clients come to the page the link diverts them to some other marketing page. As per laws, this is a legitimate practice, but if the search engine team finds out the truth they might black list your page.

Filtering IP address:

Each and every surfer on the net have one unique IP address. Many websites use this for their advantage. They filter out IP addresses of search engine servers and show them some different page. But when actual clients visit the site from regular IP address they are taken to page of their choice. Thus, making search engine bots ineffective. This type of cloaking is also not allowed by search engines.

Cloaking can add to the traffic of your site. But it has one inherent disadvantage. Since most of your site traffic is coming through search engine, and prospects that come to your site have been misguided to it, chances of conversion are very low. Cloaking can be shortcut of getting higher visits to your page, but in the long run, it does not yield any benefit. And hence it is advisable not to use this type of ideas.

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