What is cloaking?

gentlemedia commented: google it! -1

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Cloaking is a term used to define the practice of not presenting the same URLs or content to search engines and users. However, this practice is strictly against Google's webstar guidelines, as it leads to users receiving different results than expected.

If you find it hard to understand, here are some examples to help you out:

  • Serving search engines with a page of HTML text while displaying a page of images to the human user.
  • Stuffing text or keywords in a page only if the user agent who is requesting the page is a search engine and not a human visitor.

Overall, cloaking represents the dual nature of a website. If a website uses a technology that makes it difficult for search engines to find the site's actual content, like images or javascript, this would be considered suspicious activity by Google and will greatly affect your website's ranking.

However, it is not always the owner who is utilizing cloaking; sometimes when a website gets hacked, the hacker uses such practices to make it tough for the website owner to detect the hack.

Understand cloaking as masking the website to appear differently to search engines. This practice may provide a better ranking for a while but will cost a lifetime ban if caught.

In SEO, cloaking is a technique for presenting different pages to both search engine crawlers and users. Search engines consider cloaking a black hat SEO technique that violates Google webmaster guidelines because it delivers different results from what the users expected. It displays pages with completely different content and links influencing the website’s ranking on SERPs.

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