Cloaking in SEO?
Cloaking (CL) is a search engine optimization technique, basically is a form of doorway pages technique. Doorway pages (DP) are created to rank high in search engine results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending you to a different page. They are also known as gateway pages or bridge pages. When you click a DP its takes us to the different web page. DP's are primarily designed for search engine for redirection to another higher site.
CL is often done for tricking the search engine to let the particular page rank higher, PR so when Search Engines discover such a site they simply ban that site.
Professional creates a cloaked page which is invisible to the visitors. It contains the code to sense the next visit of the search engine spiders and code let spider to sidetrack another page.
Valid reasons of Cloaking
- When you are upgrading your site and need to sustain previous files.
- You already have a website and want to use your website with your business name or keyword.
Example of Cloaking
If site X is linked with Site Y and Site Y may or may not be linked with Site Z. If a spider or human come follow the link in the form of X to Y then finally to the Z. The all traffic will be redirected to the Z site and links will be never shown in the back links of site Z. This is done by 301 Redirect form of cloaking.
301 Redirect is a status code definition is a part of Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1 according to there definition
301 Moved Permanently
The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs. Clients with link editing capabilities ought to automatically re-link references to the Request-URI to one or more of the new references returned by the server, where possible. This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise.
The new permanent URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s).
If the 301 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued.
Note: When automatically redirecting a POST request after receiving a 301 status code, some existing HTTP/1.0
user agents will erroneously change it into a GET request.
You can find more information regarding status codes at http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html
Danger in Cloaking
Cloaking is a black hat SEO procedure and the reason why it’s being used is it’s fairly easy to rank up in the SEs by employing unprincipled SEO tactic. If search engines realize a CL website it results in complete reject of the website from the search engine index.
