Cloaked page

what does it mean?

[abiao]

hi,i am from China,i dont know the exact mean of "Cloaked page ".
anybody tell me its meaning in simple,easy language,if possible,give me some examples.
thanks in advance.

[volatilegx]

No examples, but basically, in the context of this forum, a cloaked page is a dynamic web page which severs different content based on the identity of the requester. For instance, if a cloaked page is accessed by a search engine, it shows content optimized for a good ranking in search engines, and if it is accessed by a web surfer, it shows content designed for human eyes.

For more info, see:

[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

[rominosj]

cloaking is feeding search engine spiders one page and sending real users to another page. So, for instance, you could send the spider a page full of nonsense, or maybe good optimized info on marketing, but the user gets a different page full of porn links. However, the initial purpose of cloaking was to conceal your well optimized code to avoid letting your competition use it without permission to their advantage, but because of the abuse it is now considered spam.

[itisgene]

So, is it OK to send the spiders to the same page without the session ID at the end of URL and send users with the session ID based on the User agent?

I know somebody said it is OK to use user agent to serve same page with different URL but I am not sure if it is still true.

Can anyone with real experiences (Moderator or GoogleGuy) tell me if this is OK?

We cannot remove the session ID from URL all together because of some technical and political(?) issues.

If someone can point me to the correct threads for this, I will really appreciate it.

Thanks,

[volatilegx]

If the content of the page remains the same, then I imagine it's "OK".