Review of cloaking and stealth techniques

• Apr. 15, 2003

In June 2000 an interesting article was published on our site about cloaking, stealth, and spamming.  You can get descriptions of these techniques in the previous article.

In essence, these are techniques used to serve up different web content to different users, whether they are search engine spiders, web browsers or others.  Now there are different types of stealth techniques, and some are necessary but a web site owner must consider the implications of using such techniques.

In some cases it may be necessary to hide content in order to protect intellectual property so that others do not illegally copy it for their own use.  However, this type of content redirection is considered spam by the search engines.  Now, if you don’t want certain content to get found by search engines, this is one way to guarantee that it won’t.  In fact, search engines may (and probably will) go so far as to ban your site altogether for such techniques.

There are other ways to protect your content as well, and these alternatives should be considered before using any type of hidden redirect.

Another reason some sites use this type of redirection is to provide browser functionality.  By serving up different content for different browsers you are ensuring your visitors get the same or similar experience regardless of what type of computer hardware and software they are using.

Please be aware though that there are other ways to achieve this.  Javascript is a powerful tool which you can use to help identify browsers and serve content based on the identification made by the java.  Therefore such cloaking techniques shouldn’t be necessary to achieve your results.

As far as search engines are concerned, cloaking and other stealth techniques are still spam and will get a site banned.  Even if you are using these techniques for legitimate reasons you will likely get yourself removed from their indexes.  We also still consider these types of redirection as unethical therefore will not condone their use in any way.  We can offer alternatives if you feel you really must protect your content, but we will strongly advise against it.

Rob Sullivan
Production Supervisor
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning
specialists