Additional cloaking techniques possibly take action this 2011 as tweeted by Google’s Matt Cutts over the weekend. It is said that this goal was set aside in the past but will make it a goal this year.
For some people who don’t know what is cloaking, it is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to that presented to the user’s browser. It is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page.
Cutts said that Google be more at cloaking Q1 2011. Google will put emphasis not just page content matters but also on avoiding different headers and redirects to Googlebot instead of users.
Google makes sure that they will pay attentions to aspects users this time. The company admits that here on some level they were taking action on cloaking page content. Google also discussed about bots which may not ‘see’ on a page that include the meta headers and the redirects.
In WebmasterWorld thread, Tedster said that he is hoping a “false positives” period after any particular change is not too extreme. If there are any dramatic ranking drops by 2011, they will surely suspect “Google Cloaking”. But he was not quite sure if Google did target the different headers or redirects or did not.
There are still a lot of questions and confusions about what Google’s Matt Cutts meant in his 136 character tweet. Of course, many of SEOs and Webmasters would really love to hear more detail most especially in a blog post. While on the other hand, numerous professional SEOs and Webmasters are worried about ‘false positives’ and collateral damage that will caused by this possible additional Google cloaking techniques this 2011.
