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Cloaking
Pr And Marketing5 Things More Important to Internet Buyers Than WHAT You're Selling - II Article II of a two-part series For Article I http://www ..... ...... from stealing, uh borrowing, your keywords.
There is a technique which appears, on the surface, to solve every single
problem that you could dream of having with rankings and different search
engines. This technique will make it header for people to steal your
keywords and it will allow you to have different pages for each search
engine, while still landing your visitors on a page perfectly suited for
human reading.
It's called "cloaking" and it is exactly what it sounds like. The technique
is pretty simple, really. You see, search engines are very nice about
identifying themselves. They do this for a number of reasons, one of which
is to make it easy for a web site to allow or reject their attentions
(believe it or not, sometimes there are good reasons NOT to be listed in a
search engine).
In a cloaked site, a special script is written which is executed on the
server. This can be done with ASP or PHP pages (these are two different
scripting languages) although most commonly it is done with standard CGI
scripts executed using SSI.
Using this method, the script is called before the page is loaded. The
script determines the name of the thing that is loading the page. Is it a
browser or a search engine' If it is a search engine, which one is it'
Based upon the answer, the script loads a page. So if it determines that the
page is being loaded by Altavista, it will call up the page which is
optimized for Altavista. The same goes for Google, Northing Lights or any
number of other engines.
This tends to hide the keywords and other search engine ranking techniques
from prying eyes, since human beings always see a page created explicitly to
be seen by humans. Note that this just makes it more difficult to get these
keywords, not impossible. You see, the name of the search engine or browser
(called a user agent) is handed to the server by the browser - and it's not
hard to fake (in fact, it's pretty darn trivial).
Cloaking is somewhat of a pain, since it does require a very well written
script, the use of server-side scripts, and, of course, a different page for
each engine plus one for human reading. And since it's best to do this with
ALL of your pages, it could significantly increase the amount of work you
need to put into your site.
Another thing that cloaking is very good for is to present different pages
to different browsers. This is a very cool way to create a site which looks
perfect in Netscape and Internet Explorer as well as Opera. Of course,
creating different pages for just these three browsers triples your work.
So should you consider cloaking' Absolutely not.
You should NOT use cloaking.
Let me repeat this - do not use cloaking on your web site.
On the surface it sounds like the perfect solution to search engine
optimization except for one significant fact.
Cloaking is considered by all of the major search engines to come under the
heading of search engine spamming. If you are caught (and it's easy for a
search engine to figure it out) you WILL be banned from the engine.
How do they catch you' Simple. The search engine simple sends a few test
scans at the same time to your site using different TCP/IP addresses and
identifications, and it "fools" your script into thinking it's a different
engine. If your page looks different, it's possible it's cloaked.
So my advice is simple. Don't use cloaking. Instead of putting your efforts
into fad promotional techniques and spamming methods, create quality
content, get other webmasters to link to your site, and add honest keywords,
titles, ALT tags and descriptions. Do this and your site will honestly move
up the rankings. Honesty is also without fail the best policy.
About the Author Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets at
http://www.internet-tips.net - Visit our website any time to read
over 1,000 complete FREE articles about how to improve your
internet profits, enjoyment and knowledge.
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