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We have been asked by potential
clients whether we using cloaking, spoofing or stealth
technologies. We have always told them no, we consider these
techniques unethical positioning tactics and no only do we
not use them, we recommend not using any company that does
employ them.
What are Cloaking and
Stealth?
Search engine positioners have always
been frustrated by the fact that the techniques they use to
achieve good rankings are generally transparent to other
internet marketers. By looking at the source code of a high
ranking site, the competition can employ the same tactics to
achieve higher rankings for themselves. In the worst cases,
competitors simply steal the coding and use it on their
site.
At first glance, cloaking software
appears to offer the perfect solution. Cloaking software
(also known as stealth software) sits on the server and
tracks the IP addresses of visitors to the site. When the IP
address of a search engine spider registers, a different
page from what another visitor would see is actually served
to the spider. The spider is the only visitor that will see
this page. The practice is known as IP cloaking or stealth
scripting.
So... What's the Problem?
Simply this. Search engines do not
like it when the content they index is not the same content
that a user would see. Period. It undermines the integrity
of the search engine and runs contrary to their mission of
providing highly relevant search results to their users.
Cloaking also opens the door to all kinds of abuse.
In an ideal world, Internet marketers
would only use cloaking to submit optimized pages that still
carried the same content as the actual site. If this was the
case, search engines might overlook it (in reality, this
would only be a technological twist on doorway pages). But
this isn't an ideal world, and cloaking proves that what you
can't see can hurt you.
The most recent and unsavoury example
is when a hardcore porn site used spoofing to run a
"bait and switch" scheme. They used the coding of
a U.S. sheriff's website that listed known sexual offenders
that ranked well on Altavista to hijack traffic to their
site.
Milder but no less frustrating
examples abound on the search engines. If you've seen
results returned that seem to have absolutely nothing to do
with your query, chances are cloaking is the culprit.
The search engines are cracking down
on any type of misleading redirection used by marketers. In
addition to cloaking, this includes fast meta refresh tags
(using doorway pages that immediately redirect you to
another page) and Bait and Switch (using an optimized page
to achieve a high ranking for a keyword, then substituting
another page in it's place). Use cloaking and you run the
risk of being banned from a search engine...and you DON'T
want this to happen! But don't take our word for it. Here
are direct quotes from search engine industry
representatives:
Lycos Vice President
"Our policy
is fairly strict; we blacklist the offending site."
"Lycos DOES consider the act
of hiding pages via a stealth script to be spamdexing."
Hotbot
"Our basic point of view is
that, yes, if you show the indexer one page and the
consumer another, even in good faith, you're spamming, and
you're annoying us and our users."
Excite
"If the user of the search
engine gets a page that's different than what we index, it
is not good for our users. It's bad because it harms the
user's experience. You could extrapolate from this. In
turn, it trickles down to harm the company [Excite].
Excite does not have an official policy dealing with
stealth scripting, though."
Generally, no one in the search
engine industry agrees with the practice, but policies
regarding the policing of this vary. You might get away with
it, or you might be caught and be blacklisted from a major
search engine.
To us, the risk is not worth it.
Further Resources - Other
Articles
A
Marketing Technique You Should Avoid
MarketPosition Newsletter, June, 1999
A
Bridge Too Far?
Search Engine Report, February, 1998
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