cloaking

cloaking

(1) Displaying Web page content differently to search engine spiders than to humans in order to achieve higher rankings in search engine results. Pages with more keywords on a subject tend to rank higher than those with fewer keywords, but excessive repetition of a word makes a Web page look amateurish, if not downright silly.

JavaScript and AJAX code are widely used to hide extra text when they detect a user, but allow the repetitive text to appear for a search engine spider. An older and rather simple method was to display white text on a white background.

Aggressive marketers generate thousands of cloaked pages ("phantom pages") highly tuned for the search engines (see shadow domain).

IP Delivery
Advanced cloaking is known as "IP delivery," which redirects the visitor to the appropriate Web page based on IP address. For example, an e-mail harvesting program visiting the site to find more people to spam should neither be directed to the real site for people nor the cloaked site for spiders, but to a page that is void of e-mail addresses and links to other pages. See shadow domain, spider and Web spam.

(2) Disabling the SSID broadcasting in a Wi-Fi access point, which is the continuous announcement of its presence so that portable devices can log in. See SSID broadcast.