(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 crawlers 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 with a known IP address should be redirected to a page without names or email addresses. See
shadow domain,
search engine optimization and
Web spam.