Understanding Cloaking

Cloaking is one of the black hat SEO techniques there are some SEO professionals who use this method when they optimize their websites or their client’s website. Unlike the other SEO techniques, cloaking is not that evident to the users. Therefore, you must make sure that when you hire a SEO company that they are not engaging in any form of black hat technique including your cloaking when they optimize your website. Your can get your site banned by the use of this method.

Let us take a quick look at this technique and see how it is implemented. In white hat optimization, the content presented to the visitor will be the same as the content that is presented when the search engine spider visits your site. The content is delivered based on the User-Agent HTTP header that will indicate about the nature of the user who is requesting your page. The IP address is also used to deliver visitor based content. A different content is delivered to the search engines using server side scripting and this content will not be visible to the visitors or on the regular pages of the website. So cloaking deceives the search engines.

If at all cloaking is essential for serving targeted content there are other better ways of doing it. Sometimes it is also used to trick the visitors and attract them to a particular site; the description served in the search engine results will be different from the actual content of the site and thereby misleading visitors. Often pornographic sites employ this method to get innocent visitors into their site. All major search engines consider cloaking as a black hat SEO trick and if any site is found to be using cloaking or reported of using cloaking will be removed from their listing.

There are a number of sites online that use cloaking to get their sites listed in DMOZ or Open Directory Project Web Directory. In DMOZ, human editors will be reviewing the website before the inclusion. There advanced cloaking techniques that can assess the behavior of the visitor on a page and serve content accordingly. Whenever a visitor comes via any web directory different content will be served because the human editors who like to review a website will find the link from the submission made through that directory so they will be coming to the site via the web directory. Some webmasters also try to keep the content different when the visitors are not from any major search engines. However, this will make the website lose a certain percentage of visitors; taking into consideration the benefit that they will get out of being listed in DMOZ, webmasters don’t mind losing on some visitors temporarily. Though it might be very tempting use cloaking to get better ranking and to get some quick visitors you can ruin your website’s reputation for life by engaging in such practices. Once your website gets bad reputation among the search engines, it gets rather difficult to run away from the effects.

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