Cloaking
Different Types Explained
Cloaking:
When search engine optimization started evolving and search engines became more and more
intelligent, webmasters came up with many techniques to rank their sites higher on search
engines. Cloaking is one of those techniques. It is very difficult and time consuming to make a
web site both user friendly and search engine friendly. In cloaking webmasters deliver one
page to search engines 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 clear view whether cloaking is ethical or unethical but misleading spiders and
search engines is considered to be spam. Hence cloaking techniques are 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. Therefore if a web
page differs from a cached version, the possibility that the website is using cloaking technique
is evident.
A few reasons why webmasters use cloaking techniques would be:
Use of Flash/Splash/ Videos:
HTML days are gone and Flash days are in! Many sites are built using Flash, which is totally
no-no for search engines. But does this mean you can’t have Flash on the site??? Not exactly,
the solution is to create simple HTML text documents for search engines and Flash pages for
visitors. Google is currently the only search engine indexing flash pages.
Websites containing Images:
There are many sites that are full of pictures and images. These are image-oriented sites where
the percentage of images is more than that of text. Obviously there is no way these sites will
rank high on SERP. Hence cloaking comes first in the mind for optimizing these pages.
HTML Coding:
Many times there is more HTML code as compared to text. This again does not suit for search
engine optimization. There has to be a substantial amount of text and lesser HTML coding. In
this case rather than recoding the entire websites, cloaking is the best option.
Now that you know why cloaking is done, it's time to find out how it is done. A cloaking is
done by modifying a file called .htaccess. Apache server has a module called "mod_rewrite".
With the help of this module in .htaccess file you can apply a cloaking technique for your web
pages.
Webmasters gather search engines' IP addresses (231.258.476.13) or User-Agents
(Googlebot). If mod_rewrite module detects that an IP address or user-agent belongs to a
search engine, it delivers a web page that is especially designed for search engines. If the IP
doesn't belong to any spider, then it considers it as regular visitor and delivers a normal web
page.
There are 5 types of cloaking:
• User Agent Cloaking (UA Cloaking)
• IP Agent Cloaking (IP Cloaking) • IP and User Agent Cloaking (IPUA Cloaking).
• Referral based cloaking.
• Session based cloaking.
All five have unique applications and purposes, yet all 5 can fit nicely within one program.
• User Agent cloaking is good for taking care of specific agents. Wap, Wml pages for the
cell phone crowd.
ActiveX for the IE crowd.
Quality CSS from the Mozilla and Opera crowd.
Nice black screen for the web tv'ers.
Specialty content for agents (eg: NoSmartTags, Googlebot Noarchive).
No sense sending js, java, or flash that a user can't actually run.
• IP Address Cloaking is good for taking care of demographic groups. Language files
generation for various countries.
Advertising delivery based on Geo data.
Pages built for broadband users.
Low impact pages for overseas users.
User-time-of-day determination and custom content based on the Geo data (news, sports,
weather etc…)
Specifically targeting demo groups such as AOL, Mindspring etc….
• IP and Agent cloaking is good for a combo of the above. Custom content for AOL'ers
using Wap phones.
Ads based upon Geo data and user agent support.
The possibilities are endless. You'll run out of ways to re-roll before you run out of IP’s
and agents to serve.
Indexability. Just getting your site fully indexed can be a challenge in some environments
(flash, shock).
• Referrer based cloaking is basing delivery on specific referral strings. It is good for
content generation such as overriding frames (about.com, ask Jeeves, and the Google
image cache).
Prevent unwanted Hotlinking to your graphics.
• Session based cloaking are sites that use session tracking (either from IP, or cookies);
can do incredible things with content. We have all seen session cloaking in action on
dynamic sites were custom content was generated for us.
Cloaking is the gate keeper that serves your site in its best light, and protects your custom
code from prying eyes. Search engine cloaking is just one aspect of a much bigger picture. This is why search engin
can't even consider banning cloaking. It is so widespread and pervasive, they would have to
delete 1/4th of the domains in their index - those would be the best sites they have listed.
Any time you hear a search engine talking about banning cloaking, listen to them very closel
-- and remember. If they would bold face lie about something so pervasive, what are they
doing with the really important stuff? They can't be trusted - nor can those that are out here
carrying their water.
With the assault of rogue spiders most sites are under the growing trend of framing, agents
that threaten your hrefs (smarttags). The majority of the top 2000 sites on the net use some
form of the above styles of cloaking (including ALL major search engines).