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Mosaic cloaking: a new form of search engine
spam
Webmasters involved in rather shady search engine optimization
methods invented a new form of cloaking. That new method
has been called mosaic cloaking and it is an attempt to make
cloaking less detectable.
What is cloaking?
Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique in
which the content presented to the search engine spider
is different from that presented to regular web surfers.
When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a
server-side script delivers a different version of the
web page, one that contains content not present on the
visible page.
Search engines don't like cloaking because its purpose
is to deceive search engines. If Google detects that
a website uses cloaking, it will remove the website from
the index.
What is new in mosaic cloaking?
While traditional cloaking served totally different content
to search engines and human web surfers, the new cloaking
method replaces only parts of the page.
For example, the blank space on a web page might be filled
with keyword rich text when a search engine spider requests
a page. The rest of the page remains unchanged.
Does this new cloaking method work?
It's likely that you can get short term results with this
method because it's a relatively new method to which search
engines might not have reacted yet.
However, we don't recommend cloaking to optimize your
web pages. While you might get short-term results with
cloaking, it is likely that your web site will be banned
from search engines sooner or later.
Search engines know that these cloaking methods exist
and they employ highly skilled engineers that try to detect
spammy websites with algorithms. In addition, a competitor
might manually report your website.
Google has made it very clear that these cloaking methods
will get your website banned from Google's index if you use
them. If you want lasting results, better use ethical
search engine optimization methods to get your website
to the top of Google's search results.
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