Distortion

by

Pasta

Pasta's Pissers

I just want to make it clear, getting banned from a linklist or a tgp is one thing. Getting banned from a Search Engine is an entirely different animal. Ever since I attended my first trade show I have been searching for a simple definition for the term "Cloaking". I asked a few of the more experienced SE people I was aware of at the time, the question was side stepped, or was presented as a need to know basis type of answer. I want to thank "Air" of Webmaster World If you're reading, thanks to his simple to understand explanation, again made me realize that I had an understanding but was lost in the cloud of not keeping it simple. Essentially cloaking is an advanced technique of delivering content to SE spiders to achieve optimum ranking while delivering different content that gives a more appealing surfing experience. How do you know who is visiting your site? There are two kinds of cloaking techniques that can be utilized: User agent and IP identification/delivery. User agent is a lot easier to maintain but also has a lot of insecurities. IP delivery, on the other hand, requires a lot of work. You will need to harvest and maintain the known spider IP addresses. I am sure that maintained spider IP databases are available for a price.

When creating a webpage you follow a directory structure. All files originate from www.yourdomain.com. For example, if you created a page gallery1.html, the url would be www.yourdomain.com/gallery1.html. The root path on the server would be /web/user/yourdomain/gallery1.html

The server has a built in ability to associate a url to the associated server path assigned by your host so that it may present your content page in a browser. Since the browser or spider requested gallery1.html from your site, the server knows where to find the content /web/user/yourdomain.com/ gallery1.html. The actual path the content came from is transparent to the request for the content.

The way the cloak would work would be to serve different versions of gallery1.html to the following SE's. For example, Google, Hotbot, alta vista, you would set up the following directory structure:

/web/user/yourdomain/Google/gallery1.html
/web/user/yourdomain/Hotbot/gallery1.html
/web/user/yourdomain/Altavista/gallery1.html

Nothing too complex right? The page you have created is:
www.yourdomain.com/gallery1.html
that you would like different versions of the page delivered to specific SE's. So the way the cloak script would work is you would replace your content www.yourdomain.com/gallery1.html with a server side script ( a script that runs on the server not in the browser) when Google visits the script since its IP based would recognize Googles IP and deliver the content page:
/web/user/yourdomain/Google/gallery1.html. If Hotbot visited your site the script would deliver:
/web/user/yourdomain/Hotbot/gallery1.html. The main thing to keep in mind is that the SE requesting gallery1.html based on it IP the server delivered gallery1.html without regard that www.yourdomain.com/gallery1.html was a server side script requesting content based on a defined path.

Based on the brief description on how a cloak works, can you realize the pitfalls you are up against? Sure getting banned is always in our minds. Imagine you had a bunch of sites in the top 10? Imagine all the work maintaining the cloak from a database standpoint? A lot of work translates to a lot of time which translates into a lot of money. Time that can be better off spent on something else IMHO. But a good cloak can bring you the golden SE hits. Cloaking is intriguing, to say the least, but if it was that vital to US, don't you think Voltar would have had A Cloaking NPOW by now? Something to think about!

Hasta Pasta

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