Difference between doorway pages and cloaking

May people confuses. The confusion comes from misunderstanding or not understanding at all.

Cloaking is completely related to IP address.
Doorway pages is related to redirection using meta or .htaccess or javascript

Cloaking

Cloaking is to serve the different content to different users. Cloaking has its uses.
Cloaking is basically not a black hat technique.Using cloaking in a different way.. will comes under black hat techique.

So.. lets see about cloaking usage.

If you have a news website which serves news internationally. You would like to serve different news to different countries at the same time on your home page. This means.. you are serving different content to different users. It is not Black hat technique.

Then why Cloaking called as black hat technique?

If you serving content to search engines specially. that will comes under black hat cloaking. When you show different content to your users and to the search engines.. then that will comes under black hat cloaking. You have to treat search engines as your normal visitors. Do not treat them different than your visitors.

You can serve different content to the browser than that of search engines depending on the type of request(User-agent HTTP or others) your server gets.

Doorway pages

Doorway pages are something different than cloaking.

Using JavaScript


Search engines ignores javascript. If some one takes advantage of it .. and redirects the visitor referred by search engines to a different page.

Another kind of building a doorway page is..

Using meta redirect tag.

Lets see the syntax of meta redirect tag

<meta HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="60; URL=http://www.redirectsite.com/">

I am not sure whether Google or any other search engine considers the time with in meta redirect tag.
What if some one keep the time of 6000 seconds = 100 minutes which is greater than one and half hours.

This means.. the visitor almost finishes reading content on that page and closes the page before the browser redirects to the destination page. But the search engines considers the redirected page content in the search results.


So.. be smart.