Sat 28 Oct 2006
How search engine detects Page Cloaking or Code Swapping?
Posted by sanderson under SEO Articles , SEO TutorialPage Cloaking is also known as “Code Swappingâ€. There are three ways, by which search engine can detect to see if site has used cloaking.
1. User-Agent cloaking
2. IP based cloaking and
3. A Human Representative.
1. User-Agent cloaking: If someone has used this type of cloaking then search engine sends a spider to a site without reporting the name of the search engine in user agent variable. If search engine finds dissimilar pages – the one that is accessed by a spider which reports search engine name and the spider which doesn’t report, then it is likely to be considering as a page cloaking.
2. IP based cloaking: A spider can be sent by the search engine via other IP address instead of those IPs used earlier by a spider. It is obvious that this new IP used by a spider will not be there in the database used for code swapping or cloaking. If the page delivered to a spider of known IP address (old spider) is detected different than the page delivered to the spider with new IP address (new spider), then search engine knows that the page cloaking has been used by a site.
3. Human Representative: assigned by search engine may visit a site to find out if the site has used cloaking. If he finds that the page delivered to a search engine spider is totally different than the page he has viewed, then he identifies that the site has used cloaking.
2 Responses to “How search engine detects Page Cloaking or Code Swapping?”
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October 28th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Another way of detecting a cloaking website is to compare the cache from known spider to the cache from an unknown spider. Known and unknown spider relative to the cloaker. It is believed that most search engines have devised methods to detect cloaking and most of them have implemented a Zero Tolerance approach against cloaking which means they will either ban your site completely from their index or reduce it’s rankings drastically.
October 15th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
this is only possible if both (known and unknown) spiders crawl the page at the very same time. If there is a time difference, there can be differences in content with no cloaking.