5 Types of Search Engine Cloaking

There are 5 different types of Search Engine Cloaking:

1. User Agent Cloaking (UA Cloaking).


2. IP Agent Cloaking (IP Cloaking)


3. IP and User Agent Cloaking (IPUA Cloaking)


4. Session based cloaking


5. Referral based cloaking

1. User Agent Cloaking is good for taking care of specific agents.
Wap, Wml pages for the cell phone crowd. Active X for the IE crowd. Quality CSS for the Mozilla and Opera crowd. Specialty content for agents. Eg: NoSmartTags, GoogleBot Noarchiv. And no sense in sending out stuff with javascript, Java applets, or Flash than a user can't actually run.

2. IP Address Cloaking is good for taking care of demographic groups.
Language file generation for various countries. Pages built for broad band users. Low impact pages for overseas users. Advertising delivery based on GEOdata. User-time-of-day determination and custom content based on tod geo data (news, sports weather..etc.)

3. IP and User Agent Cloaking is good for a combo of the above. Indexability. Just getting your site fully indexed can be a challenge in some environments like Flash, Shock. Custom content for AOL users using Wap phones. Ads based upon GEOdata and UserAgent support. The possibilities for targeting are almost endless. You will run out of ways to reroll it before you run out of ips and agents to serve.

4. Session based cloaking. Sites that use session tracking - either from ip, or cookies, can do incredible things with content. We've all seen session cloaking in action on dynamic sites were custom content was generated for us.

5. Referrer based cloaking is basing delivery on specific referral strings. It is good for content generation such as overriding frames - About.com, AskJeeves, and the Google imagecache. And it is good for preventing unwanted hotlinks to your graphics.