do u people have any idea about cloaking? can u people discuss it here.

Basically it's the practice of displaying one web page to one set of people and a totally different web page to another set of people. A more commonly usage is to show one web page to viewers and another to search engines crawlers.

Good way to get banned by the Google Gods...but if you know what you're doing it can be very useful...

Here's a decent write up on it...

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007...-cloaking.html

Its also a black Hat Optimization techniques which used by optimizers. You can actually render different set of web pages (different in content, keyword density) to different Search Engines. This technoque was used to counter different search engine algos used by different search engines. Its now banned by Search Engines and any site which uses this technique of optimization is banned from search engines index.

Originally Posted by Madona

do u people have any idea about cloaking? can u people discuss it here.

Cloaking is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-AgentHTTP header of the user requesting the page.

Would it be uncouth to do this in a way that presents (for example) http://www.webmaster-talk.com/sitemap/ (the archive) to GoogleBot, but the regular http://www.webmaster-talk.com/ to everyone else?

according to me cloaking is used to display optimized pages to specific search engine crawlers

Cloaking is a system of delivering custom content to a spider but hiding the code and / or content from a user.It can also be defined as Serving one version of a page to a human visitor and a different version of the same page to the search engines.Cloaking is also known as also known as "stealth," and it involves serving a specific page to each search engine spider and a different one to human visitors. In most cases, frowned upon by search engines

Hi,

Cloaking is nothing but a search engine optimization. The content to the spider is different from the one which is presented to the user browser.

Originally Posted by ssandecki

Basically it's the practice of displaying one web page to one set of people and a totally different web page to another set of people. A more commonly usage is to show one web page to viewers and another to search engines crawlers.

Just to be a stickler for details, 'cloaking' usually means doing this in bad faith. If you use code to figure out whether the user agent ( browser, spider , feed reader ) supports Flash, and then send down an html version to people who don't, most people wouldn't call that cloaking. Or, if you figure out where the user is, geographically, by their IP address and send a version of the page in what you assume to be their language by default, or just adjust to the local time zone, that's probably not cloaking, either.

A real world example is experts-exchange.com: a forum about software development. They score well in Google, but where the answers to the question that starts each thread would go, there's an image of blurred text. A 'payment wall;' to get the answer, you need to join. If you click cached from the serps, you get the answers.

Technically that's not a very different thing from defaulting collapsible lists to display: block when you know a browser doesn't support javascript to expand the list. That's perfectly legit ... just like putting a bunch of second level navigation links in a hidden div, as long as there's a way to unhide it. Like most menu systems.

In a seo sense, cloaking means tricking Google into thinking you have something really good, and then sending real people a give-me-money page. You would do this by using server-side code to sniff out the user agent string and then send down whatever version of the page you want that person/software to see. If you like free search engine traffic, though, tread lightly.