Cloaking pages
15 March 2009
Page cloaking is a web page serving two different sets of content.
If a search engine goes onto the page it will display one page of content to try and raise keyword density and so raise search engine rank.
But if a normal website visitor goes onto the page they will be shown a page of different content.
A common example is when there's a flash website - the flash website is shown to the user, whereas, the text only version is shown to the website visitor.
To create a cloaking page you will need to use a piece of Javascript that will determine the website visitor's user agent (web browser type). After differentiating whether it's a search engine spider or a normal website visitor the Javascript will redirect to the correct page (for search engines or for website visitors).
Creating a cloaking web page is likely to get your website penalised by Google and other search engines, and so highly recommend not creating such a page - but at least now you know what it means when everybody talks about it.
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