Cloaking and Page-Jacking

by Michelle Anderson

"Page-jacking" is the new artform whereby unscrupulous webmasters copy popular sites such as Microsoft and the Harvard Business Review to their own servers and use a cloaking system to deliver those stolen pages to search engines.

Once the search engine spiders find the pages, they are indexed, and unwitting surfers looking for, say, Microsoft, would click on what they thought were going to the Microsoft site and would be instead page-jacked to an unrelated site which used this method.

Last year, the FTC "cracked down" on pagejacking, bringing the technique to the attention of the general public. http://www.ftc.gov/opa/1999/9909/atariz.htm

"Cloaking" or "IP Delivery" is a technique which allows you to deliver different pages for the same URL based upon the IP address of the requesting agent.

When the server receives a page request, a script checks the IP address of the user agent (or browser) using a database of known search engine IP addresses. If a match is found, the server delivers an optimized, "search engine friendly" page for the spider to index. This page is optimized for each search engine, according to each search engine's algorithm. These pages are invisible to the regular user.

If no match is found, the requesting user agent is sent to the page the public sees.

In other words, cloaking shows an optimized doorway pages to the search engines while displaying different and beautiful pages to human visitors.

Aside from the obvious advantage of being able to feed the search engines pages which are specifically designed for high placement, IP delivery also hides the meta tags from anyone who might want to steal them to boost their own placement.

While IP delivery is clearly appropriate and ethical when used, say, to optimize a page which is only a flash page or just a graphic, the potential for abuse is there.

Anyone can learn to write their own cloaking script at sites like the one at http://www.spiderhunter.com/. The cost of commercial cloaking software ranges from $25 to more than $1,000.

An interesting situation arose last month, when a search engine optimization firm filed a complaint with the FTC about another SEO firm allegedly pagejacking using cloaking. The two principals made appearances at SearchEngineDiscussion.com, each airing his own side of the case. http://searchenginediscussion.com/ubb/Forum61/HTML/000001.html

Is cloaking ethical? When used appropriately, yes. The problem is that since everything is hidden, webmasters and search engine optimizers who use this technique are on their honor.

Will the search engines penalize you for using it? Not yet. But it's probably going to happen. Given that the main objective of search engine alogrithms are to prevent manipulation which renders relevancy irrelevant, as it were, surely this is yet another trick that isn't going to be around for long. I certainly wouldn't counsel anyone to spend money on cloaking at this point.

Michelle Anderson is CEO of Laisha Designs

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