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21Aug/100

Client and Server Side Cloaking

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What is cloaking?

Cloaking is the method of showing different content to user based on various factors.

Examples of Black-Hat SEO cloaking:

  • Search engine cloaking (serving content that ranks for a keyword to the engines in order to lure visitors in, but then redirect the visitor to another page or show them an offer for a product and/or service)
    • This particular technique is against Google's webmaster guidelines and can really annoy visitors

Examples of White-Hat SEO cloaking:

  • Showing slightly different content based on
    • the visitor's location
    • the visitor's screen size
  • Banned users can be completely redirected or just straight up refused service

Client Side Cloaking Example

Put this code between the <HEAD> </HEAD> header tags:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
function delayer() {
  window.location = "http://redirect-address"
}
//-->
</script>

Put this in your <BODY> tag:

<body onLoad="setTimeout('redirectme()',  1000)">

The number 1000 indicates time in milliseconds to wait before the page is redirected - set it to 0 to redirect immediately after the page is loaded.

Server Side Cloacking Example:

Put this somewhere in the header of your PHP file:

<?php

$ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];

if (FALSE) // ((strstr($ref, 'google') !== FALSE) && (strstr($ref, 'q=') !== FALSE))
{
  echo '<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://redirect-address">';
  echo "\n";
  echo '</head>';
  echo '<body></body></html>';
  exit(0);
}

?>
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