SEO Mosaic Cloaking

January 25th, 2008 Posted in SEO

Some rather unscrupulous SEO specialists have now enlisted a new method of Search Engine Optimisation. It has been labelled as ‘mosaic cloaking’ and is an attempt by shady SEO workers to make cloaking activities less detectable by search engine engineers.

Cloaking put simply is the process of creating content that is solely there for search engine spiders to locate. It creates a page that will appeal to search engine criteria but not be presented to the human user. The process involves identifying search engine spiders and presenting them with a different version of a web page that is not visible on the normal page. Search engines dislike this method of SEO as it actively deceives search engine processes, subsequently pages that use this method are often de-listed from a website index.

‘Mosaic cloaking’ differs from its predecessor as instead of presenting a completely different web page to spiders, it presents a page with only minor changes from the visible page. For instance, mosaic cloaking may utilise a blank part of a visible page and fill it with keywords in order to make the web page more appealing to search engine spiders.

This method is likely to obtain short term results; this is mainly due to the fact search engines have not reacted to it yet. Cloaking however is not a sustainable way in which to optimise your website. Eventually search engines will identify your methods and remove you from their index. Search engines employ highly skilled engineers that identify these cloaking methods so it will only be a matter of time before these bad practices will be picked up.