SEO FAQ

What is the difference of IP delivery and cloaking?

Trust level: Proven and confirmed

Here is a comment from Matt Cutts of Google dated April 18, 2006 on his blog:

IP delivery: delivering results to users based on IP address. Cloaking: showing different pages to users than to search engines.

IP delivery includes things like "users from Britain get sent to the co.uk, users from France get sent to the .fr". This is fine-even Google does this.

It's when you do something *special* or out-of-the-ordinary for Googlebot that you start to get in trouble, because that's cloaking. In the example above, cloaking would be "if a user is from Googlelandia, they get sent to our Google-only optimized text pages."

So IP delivery is fine, but don't do anything special for Googlebot. Just treat it like a typical user visiting the site.

So it all comes down to intent.

Answer provided by:

Jim Westergren

SEO FAQ

	Submit an answer or add information to the question: What is the difference of IP delivery and cloaking? Only the top high quality submissions are approved. If you don't know SEO it is not needed that you waste your time here.
Trust level:	It is important that you select the correct one.
Answer:	Thousands of people will read what you write here and you represent it with your name. Only unique content, no cut and paste (I will check with Google - don't want this site be hitten by the duplicate content filter). Don't write something that was already answered to this question earlier but you may add information to earlier answers. Any promotion for any company/person etc. will be edited out. HTML can be used but sparingly. Use <em> instead of <strong> to emphasize words. But feel free to use headings, lists and vital neutral links.
Name:	Personal name, company name or forum nick name only. This is not for your keywords, sorry.
URL:	Only accepted to site related to SEO and you. For example: SEO company, personal SEO oriented blogg or forum profile of SEO forum.
E-mail:	Optional. If you provide one I can contact you with editing questions and let you know if your answer was approved.
	Please verify that all is ok before submitting.

SEO FAQ

Although great efforts are taken to ensure the answers posted in this FAQ are true, no guarantee is made that it is so and no responsibility is taken by this site nor the authors concerning your rankings or SEO activities.