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Cloaking

 

Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the users; this is done by either looking at the IP addresses of who is requesting the page, or by looking at the User-Agent HTTP header. While there are some legitimate uses for cloaking, like giving text to the search engines while giving Macromedia Flash to users (since search engines can't understand Flash), cloaking is most often used to try to trick the search engine into giving it a higher ranking than it would get without cloaking; it can also be used to trick search engine users into visiting a site that they ordinarily wouldn't, because the search engine's description of the site differs from the site's actual contents. For this reason, sites that are discovered to be using cloaking are permanently banned by most search engines.

Cloaking is a form of doorway pages technique.

!!! This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license. See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html for details. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Cloaking !!!

 

 

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