(Continued)     September 11, 2004 edition

Question: Serge, thanks for a great newsletter. I like the way you write and wish to congratulate you on your work. My question is, what exactly is “cloaking” and is it true it can put me in trouble with the search engines?

I'm happy to know you like my writing and that it helps you. Cloaking is never a good idea and yes, it can put you and your website in trouble, as far as the search engines are concerned. You will find some of the reasons by reading this article on cloaking I wrote a while back.

By definition, cloaking is a technique of delivering a certain set of pages to search engine crawlers, while at the same time delivering a completely different set of pages to your "human" visitors. There are many ways of doing this.

Although some will tell you that the most effective way to cloak is with the use of IP (address) delivery software, the jury is still out on this and opinions vary widely. The subject of cloaking has always been and still IS a very controversial topic!

Sophisticated cloaking software that makes use of IP delivery to cloak pages are complex programs that, in order for me to properly explain their functioning, would fall beyond the scope of this newsletter.

I will simplify this by saying that when a search engine spider or human visitor requests a specific Web page, cloaking programs compare the IP address of the requesting party to a database of known IP addresses from specific search engine spiders. If the IP address matches one on the list, it serves a particular page that was specifically written for the search engines to the spider.

You can read a lot on the controversial subject of cloaking if you click here.

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