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Many people who are web designers use cloaking, but for the rest of us, the question of what is cloaking is an important one. Basically, cloaking is a technique used to optimize a web page to get the best results and highest ratings from a search engine. There is no real mystery to what cloaking is. It is a very simple technique that any web designer can use, but it can sometimes backfire quite dramatically. Cloaking is when a web page delivers different results to a search engine than it does to individual users. The results given to the search engine are keyword optimized to increase hits, but the ones to the users are just the sites normal content as the user expected.
Of course, the definition of what is cloaking varies depending on who you ask. Some people think that personalized content is cloaking, but most others disagree. When I asked a friend of mine who is a web designer what is cloaking, he explained all about this issue. Basically, some websites will change their content depending on who you are, how often you visit, and where you are physically located. For example, they might show ads for apartments or services available in your area. Although some people can't say exactly what is cloaking, most will disagree that this is an example of it because, even though it gives the search engine different information than it might give some users, it still gives the engine information that it would give a user from wherever that search engine is accessing it. The second question people ask after they find out what is cloaking, is whether it is something that is a good idea for web designers. This is a good question, and the answer is quite complicated. Not all of the experts agree. There are some good reasons for cloaking. Many web designers use it to hide their optimization content so that other designers can not steal it. This is a good idea, not only because their content represents an investment of time and money, but also because, the more people who use their web optimization information, the less it is worth. Once a certain set of keyword optimized documents gets well known all over the internet, the search engines will recognize it and penalize sites for using it. But then again, the sites can get penalized for using cloaking in the first place! The question of what is cloaking is much easier to answer than whether or not to use it!
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