What is cloaking?
Cloaking, as it relates to web design, is the act of differentiating between two website visitors in order to provide specialized content to each. Most people use cloaking for purposes of providing search engine spiders with different content than they provide human visitors. The reason for this is to optimize your chances of getting a high listing in search engines, without modifying your existing content.
In situations where a web site may "convert" well - meaning, it turns many visitors into customers - but doesn't rank highly in search engines, web designers often find themselves in a dilemma. Do they modify their content to get higher search engine ranking - but risk losing the conversion ratio; or do they forget the search engine ranking and focus solely on making sales?
With cloaking, it's possible to achieve both goals, and maximize profits in the process.
You see, any lost traffic is a lost potential customer. Therefore, it is important to rank highly in search engines to get the absolute maximum profits possible from your site.
How does cloaking work?
While all cloaking scripts and services work differently, most determine how to handle traffic by analyzing the IP address of the visitor. They compare that address with a list of known "spiders" (search engine programs that index web pages). What happens after this depends on what service or script you use.
Some cloaking scripts will redirect the spider to an optimized web page. Some of those use techniques that allow the spider to recognize that it's been redirected. This can have adverse consequences if the spider is programmed for such things.
Other cloaking scripts only redirect human visitors. Humans are less likely to have a problem with being redirected (it's actually pretty common when businesses change web hosts, for example).
Another difference between cloaking scripts and services is in the content they provide to the search engine spider. There is much debate about what is an "optimized" web page. Therefore, there is a variety of cloakers.
Is cloaking legal?
There is nothing inherently illegal about cloaking. What I mean by that is this. Cloaking itself is not illegal, but what the person does with the technique may be. For example, if a cloaked page appears in the search engine listing as a website for purchasing children's toys, but actually gives human visitors a page with pornographic material, this could violate a legal statute, depending on the age of the visitor.
However, cloaking in this way is typically reported and, therefore, is not effective. For most webmasters, this is not the purpose of their cloaking script.
Is cloaking ethical?
While to some extent it depends on who you ask (ethics are very subjective), for the most part I would have to say, again, there is nothing inherently unethical about cloaking.
Again, it could be used for such purposes, as in providing the search engine with a page that is full of free information about a topic, while redirecting human visitors to a sales page. In my opinion, such an act would be quite unethical.
Does cloaking work?
This is perhaps the most important question of all. Since most cloaking services and scripts are not free of charge, one must ask the obvious - is it going to work?
Like anything else, there are some cloaking services which work very well and others which seem to do nothing at all. (Of course, anything like cloaking - which has somewhat of a negative connotation to it - is typically supposed to be undetectable.) Before subscribing to any cloaking service, or purchasing a cloaking script, it is always a good idea to do your due diligence. Ask questions of the company that's offering the cloaker. Ask people who have used the script. Find out what results they have had. Remember that just because one service or script is more expensive than other does not mean it's necessarily better.
