To cloak or not to cloak

Cloaking is a technique that has generated much discussion in the webmaster community. The possible benefits are unquestionable, the risks are out there, and the impact on the quality of the internet as an information resource is debatable.

Clokaing is basically a technique of displaying different page content based on the user that is viewing the page. There are many ways of determining the user, and displaying the different content. Some use javascript redirect where the redirect routine is in an external file, while others user server side scripting to serve up different code based on the IP address of the client. There are, of course hundreds of different variations, with varying levels of ethics in their intent.

The benefits of cloaking are mainly search engine related, although some webmasters use it for such things as redirecting users to certain sections of a site based on their DNS suffix, as a way of redirecting users based on country. Strictly speaking, if the address in the address bar changes, it is not true cloaking, but rather a redirect. In some of the javascript techniques I have come across, there is an html page with rich keyword content, and a javascript routine that will redirect only IE and Netscape browsers to another page. This leaves any search engine crawler or text-only viewer (or anyone with javascript disabled) looking at the content rich page, whilst everyone else is redirected to a graphics rich page with frames which is good for selling, but which would never rank in the search engines.

The problem I have with this is that just about every non IT professional computer user that I know complains about seeing results in the SERPs with a certain title and description, under a certain search. They click on it, and are then directed to a page which contains none of the text from the search engine listing. This is annoying, especially on a slow connection. This is the kind of thing that makes people not want to use the internet and visit new websites, which is bad for all of us who run websites.

I'm sure there are people who say "how else can one get a website that uses frames in the serps?" and my answer to that is "I wouldn't have a clue." Frames were back in the early 90's and although it is a good concept and it was a shame that the resource addressing structure of the internet didn't support it well in the long term. Unless the cloaked page represents the exact text that is on the framed page, how can it not be misleading? If the search engines are going to allow cloaked pages for sites that use frames, what is there to stop this from being abused? There is already a constant game of cat and mouse being played where "black hat" webmasters use doorway and cloaked pages to spam the indexes.

As search engine technology improves, their ability to detect cloaking will also improve. For this reason, I do not engage in any cloaking practices, even as a competitive measure, as I believe the sites that currently use it (many large established sites, some in sectors in which I compete) will get pinged in a big way at some stage. Crawlers that can read JavaScript properly can't be far off.