What Is Cloaking

[chawong]

Cloaking is a Black Hat SEO technique. A method in which user and web crawler are presented with different content.

[vino]

Cloaking refers to a search engine optimization, or SEO, method used by webmasters to deceive search engine crawlers by presenting different content to the search engine than that which is presented to a user. Search engines such as Google’s consider this a violation of ethical internet practices, and there are consequences for doing it. Current digital marketing strategies must include ways to avoid cloaking, and SEO experts warn against it. When Googlebot, Google’s web-crawling device (that essentially ‘crawls’ the web and discovers new and updated pages to be added to Google’s index) finds cloaking, it considers it unethical and there are consequences. Therefore, it is necessary to be able to recognize cloaking and avoid it.


Cloaking occurs by delivering content based on IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user who is requesting a certain page. When a user is determined to be a web crawler, or ‘spider,’ a server side script will deliver a different version of the page than it delivers to other users. This version will contain content that does not appear on the page that is visible to users. Webmasters who practice cloaking typically do it to fool a search engine so that it will display the page that would not otherwise be displayed. Google’s algorithms can pick up cloaking, and it can be dealt with through severe consequences to those who practice it. Google may remove a site that contains cloaking entirely from its index. Cloaking is a form of a doorway page, which is a web page created for spamdexing. Spamdexing, or search engine spamming, is done solely for the purpose of manipulating a search engine. Doorway pages often are also referred to as portal pages, jump pages, or gateway pages.

[Rachana]

Cloaking is a SEOtechnique in which the content presented to the search engine is different from that of theuser's browser.
Cloaking is used toimprove search engine ranking by confusing the search engine robot about thinkingthe content on the page and the content that is presented are different.

[yellowsapphire]

Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page.

[wordpar]

Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser.

[cuong24081995]

Cloaking is a SEO technique in which search engine is presented with different content that is shown to the user. People use this to get traffic to their site and to rank high in search engines. But it is a violation of webmaster guidelines.This technique is also called Black Hat SEO.

[PeterGenesis]

Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page.

[aegisjurist]

Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique in which the content or information presented to the user is different from that presented to search engine crawlers for better indexing.

[Ryan Tom]

Shrouding is a site improvement method in which the substance or data exhibited to the client is unique in relation to that displayed to web crawler crawlers (i.e. creepy crawlies or bots) for better ordering.

[vishwa01]

Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page

[infosteve]

Cloaking is a Black Hat Seo technique used to describe when a server uses the same URL to show a search engine crawler one particular webpage version while at the same time displaying a different webpage to human visitors.

[embeddedtraining]

Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique used to deliver the content or information on a Web page to a search engine in such a way that different content than what is delivered to a regular human user appears on the search engine. The objective of cloaking is to boost a website's search engine rank on certain keywords.

[clarac12]

Cloak is, theweb server is specially programmed to return different content to searchengines than it returns to regular users, in an attempt to distort searchengine rankings by making a cloak content. Cloaking is an illegal practice andis considered a Black hat SEO. The Search engine may permanently ban fromindexing sites or site authors that engage in cloaking.

[Wiztech_Kerala]

Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique in which the content or information presented to the user is different from that presented to search engine crawlers (i.e. spiders or bots) for better indexing. In other words, the web server is specially programmed to return different content to search engines than it returns to regular users, in an attempt to distort search engine rankings. The Search engine may permanently ban from our index any sites or site authors that engage in cloaking.

[Aachman]

Cloaking means to show the different content to the Spiders and to the Users.