Cloaking in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an unethical and black-hat SEO technique where the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user’s browser. Essentially, cloaking involves manipulating a website to show different content to users than what is shown to search engine crawlers. This is done to trick search engines so they display the page when it wouldn’t otherwise meet the search algorithm’s indexing criteria.
When a user requests a page, the server checks the IP address and sends out a variant of the webpage that is easy for bots to crawl when it identifies a search engine bot. However, when a normal user accesses the webpage, they get the actual webpage content, which might not be as bot-friendly. Thus, cloaking is used to deceive search engines into ranking a website higher than it deserves.
For example, a website might show HTML text to search engines that are looking for those specific text keywords, but the webpage users see may be filled with graphics and Flash, which are not conducive to SEO crawling. Another example would be a website presenting content about automobiles to search engines to receive traffic related to the automobile industry, but when a user accesses the site, they see only casino content.
Google frowns upon cloaking because it doesn’t align with their mission of providing the best search results for users. Google only wants to index and display pages with information that accurately reflects the content users will see when the site is visited. In Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, they explicitly say “Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. This is a violation of our guidelines…”.
If a website gets caught cloaking, it could be delisted from a search engine and lose organic traffic. There was a case in 2011 when the well-known BMW Germany website was delisted by Google because it used cloaking to inflate its ranking.
Sources:
1. Google Webmasters. “Quality guidelines – Specific guidelines”. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/quality-guidelines?visit\_id=637688146326785709-2322275195&rd=1
2. BBC News. “BMW given Google ‘death penalty’”. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12426835.
3. SEO Hacker. “What is Cloaking in SEO?”. https://seo-hacker.com/cloaking-seo/.
