BinaryWolf

SEO Cloaking Primer

Selectively serving content based on the identity of the requestor.

You have a cloaked web page on your server. This ‘web page’ is actually a CGI script which reads the IP address of the requestor. It compares the IP address of the requestor against a list of IP addresses known to belong to search engine spiders. If a match is found, then the requester is identified as a search engine spider. If no match is found, the requestor is identified as a ‘human’.

The CGI script can then selectively serve different content based on the identity of the requestor. If the requestor is human, it can serve the home page of the domain, or some other web page that is not highly optimized. If the requestor is a search engine spider, it can serve a highly optimized web page.

The point of all this is that highly optimized web pages are served to search engine spiders while human visitors get a different web page… all from the same URL.