Cloaking And Gateway/Doorway Pages

When you are looking at the search engine optimization of your website, you may come across the practice of cloaking and gateway pages. Search engines have made it very apparent that the web page delivered to the search engine spider and the web page delivered to the end user must be the same. If they are not, the search engines consider it spam and will have the site promptly removed from the search engine database.

 

Some search engine optimization companies use scare tactics to persuade people that cloaking is essential. They will tell you that others can figure out your online marketing strategy just by looking at your web pages. This is not an accurate reflection of the situation. In reality, meta-tags alone are merely not effective.

 

If the content of your web page is taken by someone else, then it is copyright infringement. Cloaking can hide copyright violation behind the stealth script. This is one of the many reasons why search engines do not like cloaking and in due course may ban its use. Another reason may be that search engines lose control over where they direct users. If a sneaky marketer procures code for a top position of "flowers" and then redirects the searcher to a furniture outlet store, it reflects negatively on both the search engine and its users.