Cloaking,
or "stealth scripts", make use of software to serve
one page to surfers and a different page to search engines. More
sophisticated scripts will even serve a different page to each
search engine, allowing you to precisely customize a page
for that specific engine. There is also a secondary reason for
cloaking your pages and that is to protect your highly optimized
page from code thieves. All a thief can steal is your surfer
page.
Search
engines once threatened to ban cloaked sites. However, most
engines have reluctantly admitted that they will not take any
action unless your surfer page is on a different subject
than the search engine page. It is imperative that your search
engine pages represent your surfer pages fairly and accurately.
If you get caught using keywords and phrases that are not related
to your actual content, you will get banned.
Cloaking
affects the keyword density analyzer when you are trying to compare
your page with a page that is cloaked. Since the Keyword Density
Analyzer is treated as a surfer by the cloak software, we
see the surfer page, not the search engine page, so we can not
determine the keyword density of the page that was indexed.
If
you are using cloaking software and you want to analyze the keyword
density of the pages that will be served to the search engines,
you must create a separate directory that the Keyword Density
Analyzer can reach. After you have verified the density and depth
of those pages, you can return them to whatever hidden directory
the cloaking software requires.
There
is no sure way to know if a page published by someone else
is cloaked. Some hints include if the title/meta are different
from the listing on the search engine. Also, Netscape allows you
to see the file creation date. If there are differences,
and the file creation date is before the index date, then you can
be reasonably sure the page is cloaked. Unfortunately, the opposite
means nothing at all.
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