Cloaking
Cloaking is the rewarding web promotion technique for those who call themselves brave heart. Since there is a fair degree of risk involved in it. However, if it hits the bull’s eye it can be pretty much rewarding. This technique is used for tricking the crawlers into getting you good search engine ranking. Two different set of pages are developed for the website. First set is the one that crawlers see and the other set is the one that visitors to the website can see. Thus the search engine optimized pages that might not be too visually appealing are seen only by the crawlers and those which are visually appealing remain visible to website visitors.

How will the website be intelligent enough to recognize whether the visitor is crawler or human visitor? The answer is IP address. Identification is done either by checking visitor’s IP address or his user-agent string. Using user-agent string is easier but has its risks such as being caught by the crawlers for cloaking. However, IP address method is much safer in this regard but one has to maintain an up-to-date list of crawler IPs. 

Cloaking is neither making doorway pages nor writing hidden text in the web pages. Cloaking does not affect the contents of the to sets of pages. It is the webmasters to job to create and optimize these pages. Though cloaking is not spamming still many search engines dislike it so much that they can imply heavy punishments on the websites using it. Your website may get buried so deep in the search results that it may never be seen by prospective targets for whom you did all the efforts. Quite possibly it may even get banned forever. 

Cloaking is more about smart work that hard work. The risk level is highly reduced if you follow some simple tricks to woo the crawlers and yet not annoy them. You might have to spend a few extra bucks but they’ll be worth it. Firstly, base your cloaking on strong and up-to-date Crawler IP Database and right page titling. Cloak site running on user-agent strings for crawler identification will soon run into trouble. Also the Meta description and the first row of text should be same for both the search engine optimized and visitor optimized pages. Remember to keep the size of these two pages more or less the same, a byte here and a byte there. Though with these petty techniques you are never really completely safe but a few intelligent moves could make you safer if not safest.