Search Engine Cloaking

noreply@blogger.com (said) — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 15:41:00 +0000

Because Spider-based search engines use automated software to build their indexes (see Idea 1: Spider-Based Search Engines), it is possible to fool them by using special cloaking software or scripts. These cloaking products provide one set of web page content (content designed to achieve good rankings for your keywords) to the search engine's spider, and a different set (containing your actual page designs) to web surfers who visit your site. Why would a webmaster want to do that? There are two main reasons:
Because a page that is optimized for a good rank with the spider-software, may not be the prettiest page to web site visitors (and vice-versa). Cloaking software allows webmasters to deal with the ranking and page-design issues separately - without having to worry improvements in one area, weakening the other area.
Because the cloaking software presents the optimized pages only to spiders (and not to web site visitors), the webmaster gets to keep his highly optimized HTML-code (and what keywords he is targeting) secret. I won't hide the fact that we do have reservations about using cloaking (and consequently do not use it ourselves). Our reservations stem from one basic fact:
Many search engines discourage cloaking, and some have been known to ban sites if they discover that they are using cloaking techniques. We understand that this is because they feel the cloaked sites may be devaluing the quality of the results provided to search engine visitors. Regardless of our reservations, many webmasters do use cloaking software, and some claim good results - so we leave it to you to consider the pluses and minuses (as well as the ethics) of this approach.

Spider-Based Search Engines

noreply@blogger.com (said) — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 15:39:00 +0000

I think that it's fair to say that when the average person thinks about search engines, even if they don't know it, they are thinking about to Spider-Based search engines. Spider-Based search engines use automated software programs ("spiders" or "robots") which visit web sites, retrieve their content, and build a database ("index") of the pages visited. When the user enters a search into one of these search engines, the data in the index is compared, analyzed and sorted to produce the search results. Achieving success with Spider-Based search engines requires several things:
Getting the spider to visit your site and index your pages. Usually this is achieved either by "submitting" your URL (Note: most services which offer submission to thousands of "search engines" include both search engines and FFAs in their overall totals - for info on FFAs

or by placing a link on a site/page that is already in the index.
You generally do not need to submit all your pages, spiders will usually find additional pages on your site by following links between your web pages.
You generally do not need to re-submit on a regular basis. Most spiders will automatically periodically revisit pages that already in the index, and thus pick up changes to your site without any action by you.
Designing your pages to contain your most important and relevant keywords. This is to ensure that your page will be included in the search results for searches on those keywords.
Designing your pages to contain your most important keywords in the most important places (for example, most spiders will usually pay more attention to a keyword that is used in the title of a page, than one that is hidden away in a tiny font at the bottom of a page). This process (variously known as "search engine positioning", "search engine ranking", "search engine optimization" or "SEO") is to ensure that your pages come up near the top of the search results - which of course makes it far more likely that people will see your site in the results and click on it.
Optimizing things which although not part of your page design ("off-page"), can also affect your search engine ranking

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Search Engine Cloaking

Spider-Based Search Engines