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Cloaking Detector - Q & A

Index of Questions and Answers



What is Cloaking?
Cloaking is a black hat SEO technique used to trick the search engines. Basically, it consists of a script which delivers one page to the search engines for indexing, while serving a completely different content to other visitors. This is possibile because the search engine spiders act as a browser: when they try to access a web page they send to the server a request which contains several elements that can be used to identify the request source, such as IP, hostname or User-Agent string. The cloaking script considers these parameters in order to identify search engine crawlers and serve them a heavily optimized, very simple webpage, unsuitable for normal users. Using this technique it is possibile to optimize every single page of a website without affecting the user’s perception and hiding the optimized code delivered to search engines.

BE CAREFUL - This technique is often considered as Spam by search engines, and if you don't implement it correctly you expose your website to the risk of being penalized or even banned from search engines index. The engines don’t like cloaking for two main reasons: first, they don’t want to index any content which is not visibile to users (redirections, cloaking, hidden text etc...); second they don’t like the chance of hiding the source code, which usually leads to black hat techinques (ie: keyword stuffing).
What does the Cloaking Detector do?
When you check an URL, the tool visits it twice, using a different user-agent: the first it claims to be Google, while the second time it makes the request as a standard browser.Then the tool compares the content received from the server with the two requests: if there are differences, you’re dealing with a cloaked page.
What does results tells to me?
As the possibile % of difference between the two documents is shown, you can have an idea of just how different the perception of the page that users experience is, from what a spider sees when crawling the very same URL. In addition, the tool provides two boxes which show the two versions of the webpage.
Can I have this tool on my website?
Of course! If you want to put the Cloaking Detector on you website in order to make it directly available for your visitors, please refer to the add the tool to your website page.
Could I review your tool?
We’d appreciate your writing a review of our tool on your website, your blog, or the forums and discussion boards of your choice. We know that many of you don’t have enough time to do this, so we provide some review templates which can speed up your work and make it easier for you to express your opinion of the tool.