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Cloaking is just one of those tools that promotes controversy wherever it's mentioned. As controversy's a fun thing, I thought i'd bait the situation by writing an article about it. If you've read anything on cloaking you'll know that it has some good uses and some bad uses. Should you really resign a useful tool to the rubbish bin just because it could be used wrongly? If you could, i guess you'd have to pop the internet in there with it.

First off, let's fill in the details for the people who don't already
know about cloaking. Basically it's the practice of displaying one web page to one set of people and a totally different web page to another set of people. This is great when there are distinctions in what the different viewers can understand. An example of this could be showing one set of pages to english viewers and another set to french viewers. A more commonly used example is to show one set of viewers to normal web users and another to search engines. Why would you want to do this? Because, frankly, search engines haven't been updated enough to properly interpret modern web pages and they can't understand anything but basics. Your normal web viewer wants flashy interactive graphics and your average stuffy old search engine would prefer boring old text
"thank you very much"! As we all know, if nobody can find your web page then there isn't really much point in having it. Another reason for using it is that you've designed some pages that rank well in the search engines, then Mr competitor comes along and steals your design. Because only the search engines see the pages intended for them, Mr Competitor will never see it.

So how do you do this? There are two major methods. The first, and simplest method, relies on whatever is calling the page up to say what it is. So if it's just a normal web browser it will say it is. If it's a search engine then it'll give it's name. One positive about the search engines is at least they choose fun names (Scooter and
Gulliver!). This method is known as User Agent cloaking - but this
method's easy to trick. If I want to be a search engine I could just
write a program to say I'm Scooter, that way I'll be fed my
competitor's pages that have been optimised for that search engine. This method is outdated. A far more reliable method is by IP. An IP is the unique address that is allocated to a machine on the internet. If we know the IP address of the search engines then we can detect them and display the different pages on that
basis. IP addresses, unlike User Agents, are extremely difficult to
fake.

Isn't this expensive and hard to do? IP based cloaking has been around for a while now, normally the scripts to perform this kind of cloaking are extremely expensive. Lately, however, a few scripts have appeared at prices more affordable to the average web master. There is currently one script, Undercover IP Cloaking, that is completely free. This brings IP cloaking into the hands of any webmaster.

So let's get back to the good and bad uses bit i mentioned. Surely
nobody can object to you having two versions of pages - one for the search engines and one for viewers, provided that the information you are passing to both is the same? Scouring the internet there are plenty that claim that even this kind of cloaking is wrong - makes you wonder if they're currently enjoying good rankings and fear the competition. What can be seen as wrong is providing search engines with pages that are completely different in content just to draw any visitor they can. As previously mentioned, any good tool is subject to bad uses - cloaking, credit cards, the internet, the telephone.

So now we the battle commences. Those that are using cloaking properly and have been for a while state that cloaking is a useful tool, that when used well can provide accurate information to search engines and protect source code. Those against say that cloaking is used to spam the search engines to provide inaccurate results. With the wave of cloaking scripts, Undercover IP Cloaking inparticular, maybe the battle might be resolved - or maybe the controversy is about to increase?

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Links:
UnderCover IP Cloaking: 
http://www.goodlookingcooking.co.uk/undercov.htm

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author: Chris Ridings, Cloaking Guru