Cloaking

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The search engines are pretty good at their jobs.
This is ... true ofthe larger, more ...
monster listings such as ... and ...
have to be good, as they are in a constant s The search engines are pretty good at their jobs. This is especially true ofthe 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 searchengine spammers (webmasters who attempt to artificially increase theirrankings in the search engines by unethical means).You see, the higher a site ranks in the major search engines, the more hitsit receives.
In many cases, hits directly translate into dollars. Thus, aweb site which can, say, double it's hits can often double the amount ofmoney it makes.What does this have to do with anything? Well, it's common knowledge thatsites which do not show up on the first three pages of listings in a majorsearch engine may as well not be listed at all.In addition, it's important that a site get listed on popular keywords.
Forexample, far more people search for the word "plumber" than "person whofixes pipes". while you might get a few visitors with the later term, youwill not get anywhere near as many as the first.Each of the major search engines has different rules that it uses to rankweb sites.
Some engines want metatags, some prefer straight text and otherswant a mixture of both. Some search engines may be fine with dozens ofkeywords 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 determinewhat your page is all about. The theory is the more a particular keyword (orphrase) is mentioned (and in more ways), the more likely your page is abouta 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 arepeople who use various tricks to fool the engine into thinking they shouldbe well ranked.
For example, a common technique a few years ago was toinclude very small, invisible text containing keywords. The visitors wouldnot see this text but the search engine would and thus would be fooled (thesearch 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 isto either (a) drop the site way down in rankings or (b) ban it entirely.
Ifyour site has ever been banned from one of the big engines, then youcompletely understand how devastating it can be to be dropped all of asudden.But then again, getting to first can be so rewarding. It can mean thedifference 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 searchengines as possible? One way is to look at other sites to see what they havedone and, ahem, steal the ideas (or just copy their keywords to your ownpages).But there is a wildcard in all of this, and that's the simple fact that thesearch engines use different rules to determine the ranking of a page. Oneengine allows three keywords and will rank higher if it finds three, anothermight want those keywords to be near the top of the page, and still anothermight want them in a comment.
The second engine (the one that wants thekeywords near the top) might actually drop your rankings if it finds threekeywords.One of the more common ways to handle the problem of different searchengines is to have different entry pages. Using this method, you might havea page which is perfect for Google, another which is exactly right forAltavista and a third which is made for Northern Lights.
The problem withthis, of course, is your visitors will be directed by each engine to pageswhich are probably not exactly right for human beings. After all, theengines work even better with all of those fancy tables and lists which makeyour pages look so good.
And, of course, this does nothing to preventsomeone from stealing, uh borrowing, your keywords.There is a technique which appears, on the surface, to solve every singleproblem that you could dream of having with rankings and different searchengines. This technique will make it header for people to steal yourkeywords and it will allow you to have different pages for each searchengine, while still landing your visitors on a page perfectly suited forhuman reading.It's called "cloaking" and it is exactly what it sounds like.
The techniqueis pretty simple, really. You see, search engines are very nice aboutidentifying themselves.
They do this for a number of reasons, one of whichis 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 asearch engine).In a cloaked site, a special script is written which is executed on theserver. This can be done with ASP or PHP pages (these are two differentscripting languages) although most commonly it is done with standard CGIscripts executed using SSI.Using this method, the script is called before the page is loaded.
Thescript determines the name of the thing that is loading the page. Is it abrowser 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 thepage is being loaded by Altavista, it will call up the page which isoptimized for Altavista. The same goes for Google, Northing Lights or anynumber of other engines.This tends to hide the keywords and other search engine ranking techniquesfrom prying eyes, since human beings always see a page created explicitly tobe seen by humans.
Note that this just makes it more difficult to get thesekeywords, 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 nothard to fake (in fact, it's pretty darn trivial).Cloaking is somewhat of a pain, since it does require a very well writtenscript, the use of server-side scripts, and, of course, a different page foreach engine plus one for human reading.
And since it's best to do this withALL of your pages, it could significantly increase the amount of work youneed to put into your site.Another thing that cloaking is very good for is to present different pagesto different browsers. This is a very cool way to create a site which looksperfect 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 engineoptimization except for one significant fact.Cloaking is considered by all of the major search engines to come under theheading of search engine spamming. If you are caught (and it's easy for asearch 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 testscans at the same time to your site using different TCP/IP addresses andidentifications, and it "fools" your script into thinking it's a differentengine. If your page looks different, it's possible it's cloaked.So my advice is simple.
Don't use cloaking. Instead of putting your effortsinto fad promotional techniques and spamming methods, create qualitycontent, get other webmasters to link to your site, and add honest keywords,titles, ALT tags and descriptions.
Do this and your site will honestly moveup the rankings. Honesty is also without fail the best policy.
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