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IP Address Delivery

Commercial cloaking software is available to manage cloaked pages. Normally this will include automatic updates for the list of addresses used by search engine spiders and their user agent names as well as addresses that should be excluded. This can make the detection of cloaked pages difficult but not completely impossible.

There are legitimate reasons for serving different pages based on the User Agent and other HTTP fields. SEOers originally used it to stop people stealing the optimized versions of their pages. Another reason is that formatting often differs between browser types and versions. This process could be used to serve different style sheets depending on whether the browser was Internet Explorer or Mozilla. A web site may wish to exclude certain countries based on domain or IP address. Finally it is useful for serving up web pages localized for different languages by using the HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE variable.

IP Address Delivery

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