Finally something worth linking to. There has been a bit of a blog drought this summer in the SEO space and I’ve been struggling to keep seoblackhat interesting and informative the last few weeks.
Dan from kloakit has written the comprehensive guide to cloaking to clear up some of the misconceptions surrounding the topic.
Notice that search engine optimization, while displayed prominently in the list, is not cloaking’s only purpose. When used for this purpose, many folks see it as unethical and search engines don’t like it. I’ll discuss that later. But there are many good reasons for cloaking which have to do with assisting the user’s experience.
I mentioned that cloaking programs look for certain criteria in a visitor’s request for a web page. Here is a short list:
* Their IP address
* Their User-Agent
* The HTTP_REFERER header
* The HTTP Accept-Language header
He goes on to explain in detail all the list items plus language cloaking, the ethics of cloaking and how the search engines view the practice. If you already cloak, this is a good refresher. If you’re new to the topic, this is a great place to start or send others that don’t understand cloaking.
I mentioned the SEO blogging drought lately; if you write or see something that I should be blogging about - send it to me. I’m quadszilla and my domain is seoblackhat.com . . . so the email address shouldn’t be that hard to figure out.
