Beware of Cloaking:Part I

How would you feel when you go to see a movie and what you see in the trailers of the movie is totally different from the movie itself? You will be shocked, frustrated, and angry at wasting time and money on something you had not wished or intended to watch. This is what happens in Cloaking where two totally different versions of the same page are shown to the search engines and the users respectively.

In cloaking a web server is scripted in such a way that it looks for search engines that are crawling. This is done so that an index of search results may be created. This fools the search engines into believing that they are selecting the key match to their results based on the meta tags that site adminstrator has input. But in reality, as a result of cloaking, the meta tags does not match the existing content on the page. Hence, the search results are misleading.

Webmasters generally resort to cloaking either to protect their pages from other search engine optimization firms or to increase search engine rankings. Every SEO company spends precious time, resources, and money to optimize websites so that they can rank well in search engines. And they don't want to reveal their strategies or techniques to anybody else. There is a lot of competition amongst different SEO firms in the ratings game. But what we forget is that merely getting a top ranking is not enough. You may get a lot of visitors to your website, but this will not, necessarily, result in increased revenue or sales.If your website displays to the visitors something different from the results returned by the search engines, people will leave your site as soon as they entered it.

So in order to create high ranking web pages, some webmasters pay more attention to how the web pages look to the spiders indexing the pages than what will be seen by the visitors.In other words, the real web page is hidden from the visitors.

Cloaking has it's own advantages and disadvantages which we will discuss in the coming blogs in detail.

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