Search Engine Optimization - Cloaking
I am currently working on Search Engine Optimization for an online marketplace. I do have a brief idea about SEO but for this assignment I need to come up with best practices. There are a lot of techniques but one thing which caught my attention was Cloaking.
Cloaking is a technique by which different content is delivered by the website based on whether the request is made by a spider (search engine crawler) or a browser (user). Cloaking can be achieved either by finding out the IP address or the User Agent HTTP header request.
In IP address cloaking based on the well known IP address of spiders, content is served by the website. Most of the search engines spiders have a well known range of IP address using which they crawl the web. The website monitors and serves special content based on the IP addresses. The catch here is to find obtain the range of IP addresses of the spiders and target them. Pretty sure that popular search engines wont give away their list of IP addresses. This said, it wont be too hard for site webmaster/admins to find them out if they monitor the requests closely.
In User Agent HTTP header request technique, every requesting entity like web browser, crawler, mobile device and other clients identify themselves to the server by sending the ser agent type in the HTTP request.
This is my first post on SEO. Will be adding a lot more soon.
Happy Blogging