Cloaking for SEO purposes
Written on 12. November 2008 – 14:39 | by seo23
Cloaking is a way of presenting different content to users that match a certain criteria such as for example the country he or she is coming from. That methode is called Geo-Cloaking to be more specific. Anyways we keep it more simple here. What i will show you is how to present different content to the google bot (or any other spider), while your normal users will see the default website. First of all you need to know what IP Addresses the google bot is coming from. Don’t worry there are existing spider IP lists out for free. Now that you have the list, you have to prepare your keyword filled spider page and save it as “index2.php” while you move your original index to “index1.php”. Of course you can give these files any name, just be sure to change the php accordingly. now put up your IP list somewhere – in this example domain.tld/ip.txt. Now put the following simple cloaking code up as index.php:
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$file = file_get_contents(“http://domain.tld/ip.txt”);
$pos = strpos($file, “$ip”);
if ($pos === false) {
include(“index1.php”);
} else {
include(“index2.php”);
}
Great you have cloaked your first site. This is a very simple cloaking example, there is some more advanced software out there, but basicially it all boils down to that. Google is ok with cloaking as long as you dont present a completely changed site to the google bot only, like 1000′s of keywords in <H1> 
..if you modify your original site to include more keywords etc, it seems to work fine. When you read the Terms of google you can see that cloaking isn’t evil in first place, only if its done in a spammy way. Still even done in a spammy way it seems to work most of the time, but can get your site banned from the google index, so use it at own risk.
Tags: bots, cloak, cloaked, cloaking, google, redirect, seo-trick, seo-tricks, spiders
