IP Cloaking

Whilst browsing the web recently I was reading the website of a web design company. Being an SEO Programmer myself I was reading to see what, if any, SEO the company offered. I was quite surprised when the company described themselves as SEO specialists and in the same sentence included IP Cloaking as an SEO technique they offered.

IP cloaking is a black hat method of gaining higher rankings in search engines by showing the spiders a different page of content that the user sees. It works by having a script on your server and when a page request comes to the server the HTTP header is checked to see were the request is coming from. If the request is coming from a search engine then a different page is presented than the normal one. This page will be purely for the search engine and will be highly optimised only for this purpose. A webmaster cannot plead ignorance towards this as it would only be set up to fool search engines.

If you use IP Cloaking on your website you WILL be removed from search engines. IP cloaking is black Hat and not tolerated by any search engine.

Gary
SEO Programmer