The practice of "cloaking" involves writing a server-side script that detects the IP address of the incoming search engine and serves it a Web page that is different from the one displayed to the general public. The indexed Web page is hidden behind a stealth script, and when the user clicks on the listing in the search engine, he or she is automatically redirected to a client's site.

People or companies that employ cloaking scripts will often rail against the evils of page-jackers and complain about others stealing their HTML codes to attain a better ranking. But two wrongs don't make a right, and it seldom happens anyway. There are so many off-the-page ranking factors in most search engines today that this is hardly a credible excuse.

There are few, very few, legitimate uses of cloaking technology...but they are never employed by the kind of SEP companies who charge clients by the click-through. The only time a cloaking script can be legitimately employed is if the user gets the very same content presented to the search engines.

The only time that a cloaking script can legitimately be employed to show a user a different Web page than the one indexed is if both the user and the search engine view the very same content but different graphical content. Search engines don't make any relevancy judgement about a Web page based on its visual appeal. Their spiders have no way of interpreting the contents of a graphic or any text contained in a graphic. They simply don't optically recognize text.

Here are reasons why cloaking would not benefit you:

1. If a search engine detects that you have employed the services of a cloaking provider, your risk having your site banned or blacklisted. Remember, a search engine has no way of knowing what you have employed a vendor. All they know is you submitted a "hidden" page for indexing and then redirected the search engine's end user. So what if you used a provider to help you? Search engines are not interested in exploring each violation case by case to determine which company employed which vendor. They are only interested in cleaning their index of hidden pages and penalizing companies that employ this tactic. If you take advantage of cloaking, you are a legitimate target.

2. All cloaking companies work outside of their clients' Web sites. None of them will help you write one META tag or prepare one directory submission. After all, a right ranking listed in a directory or attained by your site itself will steer visitors to the actual client site...not to the cloaker's intermediate page where additional traffic can be connected, referred, and ultimately billed to you. there is no inceptive for the cloaking provider to help you attain rankings in these directories or for your actual Web pages.

Finally, SEP gained through the practice of cloaking is, quite possibly, fraud. If you have a credible company, don't take a chance with cloaking. If you wish to manipulate how high your Web pages rank.