Cloaking

The search engines are pretty good at their jobs. This is
especially true of the larger, more established monster listings
such as Altavista and Google. They have to be good, as they are
in a constant state of war with search engine spammers
(webmasters who attempt to artificially increase their rankings
in the search engines by unethical means).

You see, the higher a site ranks in the major search engines,
the more hits it receives. In many cases, hits directly
translate into dollars. Thus, a web site which can, say, double
it's hits can often double the amount of money it makes.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, it's common
knowledge that sites which do not show up on the first three
pages of listings in a major search engine may as well not be
listed at all.

In addition, it's important that a site get listed on popular
keywords. For example, far more people search for the word
"plumber" than "person who fixes pipes". while you might get a
few visitors with the later term, you will not get anywhere near
as many as the first.

Each of the major search engines has different rules that it
uses to rank web sites. Some engines want metatags, some prefer
straight text and others want a mixture of both. Some search
engines may be fine with dozens of keywords in a metatag, and
others want only one. The list goes on and on - each search
engine looks at different things in a page.

Why do they go through all of this trouble? They are attempting
to determine what your page is all about. The theory is the more
a particular keyword (or phrase) is mentioned (and in more ways),
the more likely your page is about a particular subject. Thus,
if "plumber" appears in the text a few times (especially in the
H1 and H2 tags), in a metatag, an ALT tag and the title, then
it's likely your page is indeed about plumbers.

On top of that, the search engines must protect against
spammers. These are people who use various tricks to fool the
engine into thinking they should be well ranked. For example, a
common technique a few years ago was to include very small,
invisible text containing keywords. The visitors would not see
this text but the search engine would and thus would be fooled
(the search engines figured this one out a long time ago and it
no longer works).

When the search engines discover a web site is spamming, their
response is to either (a) drop the site way down in rankings or
(b) ban it entirely. If your site has ever been banned from one
of the big engines, then you completely understand how
devastating it can be to be dropped all of a sudden.

But then again, getting to first can be so rewarding. It can mean
the difference between a thousand dollars in sales and a million.
Literally.

But how do you get to be first with a particular keyword in as
many search engines as possible? One way is to look at other
sites to see what they have done and, ahem, steal the ideas (or
just copy their keywords to your own pages).

But there is a wildcard in all of this, and that's the simple
fact that the search engines use different rules to determine
the ranking of a page. One engine allows three keywords and will
rank higher if it finds three, another might want those keywords
to be near the top of the page, and still another might want them
in a comment. The second engine (the one that wants the keywords
near the top) might actually drop your rankings if it finds three
keywords.

One of the more common ways to handle the problem of different
search engines is to have different entry pages. Using this
method, you might have a page which is perfect for Google,
another which is exactly right for Altavista and a third which
is made for Northern Lights. The problem with this, of course,
is your visitors will be directed by each engine to pages which
are probably not exactly right for human beings. After all, the
engines work even better with all of those fancy tables and
lists which make your pages look so good. And, of course, this
does nothing to prevent someone 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.

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