(1) Concealing. Hiding.
(2) Stopping a Wi-Fi access point from continuously announcing its presence. See
SSID broadcast.
(3) Coding in a Web page that is hidden to humans but visibile to search engine spiders in order to achieve high rankings in search results. For example, pages that repeat the same topic word several times tend to rank high, but excessive repetition of a word makes the writing seem amateurish. JavaScript and AJAX code may be used to hide the additional words when they detect a human but allow them to appear for a search engine. An earlier simple method was to display white text on a white background.
Aggressive marketers generate thousands of cloaked pages ("phantom pages") highly tuned for the search engines (see
shadow domain).
IP Delivery
Called "IP delivery," an advanced form of cloaking redirects Web queries based on their IP address. For example, an email harvesting program that queries the site to find people to spam should not be directed to the people page or to the cloaked spider page but to a special page without email addresses and links. See
shadow domain,
search engine optimization,
spider and
Web spam.