Cloaking Technology: the Web’s Equivalent of the Stealth Bomber

Part I

- Dyanna S. Culp

You’ll find the term Cloaking being bandied about all over the web these days, but it refers to some vastly different processes. Some of the hottest cloaking topics include custom language delivery, IP based delivery for broadband users, geotargeted advertising, and hiding one’s email and/or email address, from prying eyes. Unique techniques are utilized to “Cloak” web pages for the purpose of SEO (search engine optimization). This type of Cloaking is the process of delivering one version of a web page to a search engines (such as Google or Excite) and a different version to people viewing the live Webpage. For the sake of simplicity we will only tackle Web page and Email Cloaking, beginning with the intrigue of Web page Cloaking.

Web Site Cloaking

Website Cloaking travels under a variety of alias including Stealth, Stealth scripts, IP delivery, Food Script, and Phantom page technology. It’s hot- due to its ability to manipulate those elusive top-ranking results from spider search engines. Cloaking let’s you custom design pages specifically for search engines and other pages for your site visitors. It is often confused with doorway pages, but is a completely different beast. With Cloaking users can get an attractive page decked out with flash, images, navigation tricks, easy use features, whatever tickles your fancy. You don’t have to concern yourself with search engine suitability. You feed the search engine spiders cloaked pages with specific content designed just for them.  We’re talking about the capability to substantially increase your site’s ranking on spider based search engines.

Those Prying Webmaster Eyes

Hiding HTML code from prying eyes is another tantalizing reason for using cloaking. Webmasters tend to have no scruples when ranking is at stake. When your site achieves a top search engine position, your competition will soon be circling like vultures, analyzing the pages to discover why. High-ranking pages with quality keywords often experience “Page Jacking” where the keywords, and even much of the page text, is high jacked and mysteriously appears at another individual’s Website. Ah, some people are so wicked. They may experience improved rankings, but at your expense. They start appearing right next to you in the search list. You both may slip lower and lower if the engines perceive you as duplicate sites attempting to manipulate the engine and hog the ranking limelight.

Cloaking hides your optimization strategies from competitors. Your keywords, along with their frequency and placement, remain hidden. When users click view your web page or source code they’ll be seeing the products designed for the “visitor “ page, not the pages and code that resulted in your lofty status with the spiders. Competition cannot detect your cloaking.  If they ”steal” your ideas, they won’t be stealing your engine ranking. No more pirating of researched keywords, etc. – only the search engines see your jewels. 

Why Cloak?

• It protects the ranking you achieved though hours of research, hard work, and financial output.
• It allows you to court the spiders under a “cloak” of darkness.
• Think Engine Indexability. If you have a Flash or Shockwave site getting engines to fully index the site can be a major challenge.
• Cloaking gives you free rein to design your user pages without worrying about whether or not the results will make a search engine happy. 
• It foils your sneaky competitors by making it appear that your visible page is the one to pirate- and results in their downfall. Serves them right.

How Does One Cloak?

Cloaking requires considerable time and effort if you have a site of any substantial size. Browsers connect to websites by sending out a request for the site’s root index page called an http "header”. Using cgi (perl) scripts you integrate what are basically two separately designed websites. The scripts direct website user browsers to one set of pages and search spiders to another. Cloaked websites require more constant updating and attention to detail than a “normal” site demands. You don’t want to accidentally direct a user to a cloaked spider page or vice versa. Don’t attempt Cloaking if you are unfamiliar with installation and tweaking of cgi scripts, unless you’re into self-torture.

If you are reasonably comfortable with cgi scripts there are a variety of Cloaking products lurking about.

• Free Cloaking Scripts are available at http://www.spiderhunter.com/scripts. These scripts assume you have considerable perl experience.
• Two affordable Cloaking Scripts can be found at http://www.angelfire.com/ia/cloak. God I hate their pop ups, but they provide Cloaking scripts for webmasters on a budget.
• Proclaimed Gurus of cloaking at Fantomaster offer a full arsenal for SEO, along with Cloaking tutorials and tools. http://fantomaster.com
• For a lively discussion on the hows and whys visit the Cloaking Forum at Webmaster World http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum24/. You’ll find professional discussions of cloaking usage, design, and implementation.

Unusual Twists on Cloaking

Cloaking possibilities are limited only by the imagination, and the search engines disdain—more on that below. A group of innovative Swedes are using Cloaking to attack online porn. In October 2001 they created a website (www.getsomereal.com) that uses Cloaking to lure X rated seekers to their site. The search engines think the Swedes have a porn site, but once there the user page gives you a good lecture on the evils of pornography. They’ve also developed a Cloaking tool that allows site visitors to easily create more fake porn sites. The sites hope to serve a dual purpose- to displace actual porn sites in the search engines and to encourage duped visitors to give up their porn. During their first week online close to 13,000 Cloaked “fake” porn sites were created using their online tool.

Rain on Your Cloaking Parade

With all of the possible benefits to Cloaking, why isn’t everyone (including myself) rushing to perform this marvelous feat? For the very reason you would want to Cloak- the Search Engines. The top search engines are on to it and they’re not pleased.

Some tidbits you should be aware of before dancing down the Cloaking path:

·        Search Engines stay in business based on their offering of relevant search results. Cloaking prevents them from seeing the same page as the user- this undermines their ability to produce relevant search results.

·        Delivering content designed to influence a search engine's rankings to an engine spider is officially called spam. You know what happens to Webmaster who spam engines, don’t you?

·        Marshall Simmonds, of About.com expressing sentiments shared with AltaVista and Inktomi: “Web sites that cloak will be permanently banned from the search engine databases.”

·        Goggle Guidelines available at the www.google.com “However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text that can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index. To preserve the accuracy and quality of our search results, Google may permanently ban from our index any sites or authors who engage in cloaking to distort their search rankings.”

·        The engines are becoming more savvy at detecting Cloaking. It can result in permanent banning. So you have to start all over with a new URL.

Delve deeply into the issue with this archived debate on Cloaking (at http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum24/35.htm). The discussion features a group of webmasters and a Swedish Search Engine representative. The SE rep. defines Cloaking for the purpose of html code protection as “good cloaking” versus engine manipulation as “bad cloaking”.” Obvious difficulties arise regarding how a search engine might determine which site is using good and which using bad Cloaking. Most engines do not have the time, resources, or inclination to even consider the issue—for the majority all Cloaking is “bad”. I seriously recommend following the discussion thread into part 2 at (at http://www.webmasterworld.com/discussion.cgi?forum=24&discussion=53) which becomes a restrained battle between the SEO Cloaking experts and the harried webmasters. Much can be learned regarding the importance of considering SEO before, during, and after the design process, rather than attempting Search Engine Optimization after the design is complete. In the SEO camp’s opinion, leaving search engines as the afterthought is what results in their “having” to resort to Cloaking for rankings.

Unless you’re into high risks, say NO to Cloaking

Stick with standard SEO processes for achieving ranking popularity. It may take longer, but you won’t end up permanently banned from the world’s top search engines. As emphasized many times before, you must consider SEO during the site design process and the text development, in addition to the typical campaigns after a site is launched. Besides the SEO angle, I would love to Cloak the precious code on all of my websites to hide them from prying eyes. However, my clients would not appreciate their sudden disappearance from the engines if cloaking was discovered. My hope is that some type of acceptable code protection will eventually emerge as a second-generation offspring of the current cloaking process. For the moment, the risks involved far outweigh the gains.