What is cloaking?
Search engine cloaking is when a website returns different information to a human searcher than it does to a spider that crawls the exact same site. Some experts consider it Black Hat SEO as it is essentially deceiving the search engines to get better rankings. The search engine thinks it’s selecting a key match to its request based on the content that it has been presented, but the results don’t necessarily correspond to what’s actually delivered to a human visitor.
Why does cloaking occur?
There are two general rationalizations that people who engage in cloaking give – to protect pages from other search engine optimization (SEO) firms and to increase search engine ranking. Many who engage in website cloaking would argue that they aren’t hiding anything from the search engines – they’re merely presenting an alternate version – so it’s acceptable.
Some proponents of cloaking websites further insist that they are justified because: the content is relevant despite the cloaking, the HTML code needs to be protected, you can’t compete unless you use cloaking techniques and (supporting the fact that this is indeed a slippery practice) you’ll never get caught.
These are all unsupported assertions. If your site is of good quality and has been optimized properly and naturally with the help of a professional firm like Web.com Search Agency, you won’t need to resort to such types of deceptive practices.
What is the damage of cloaking a website?
Unfortunately, while you may get increased traffic because of the results that come up, if the content isn’t relevant to what the searcher was looking for, they’ll be bouncing off your site in no time. Also, if your site is attracting a great deal of traffic, your web cloak scheme will eventually be found out and you could be banned or blacklisted by the search engines.
What you ultimately need to know is that with the amount of effort that cloaking requires, it doesn’t even work. So, if you’ve been engaging in web site cloaking, you’ve wasted your time. Many search engines, like Google, use methods other than analyzing solely what is on the page to determine its ranking.
Your best bet for improving your rankings, your site traffic and your reputation is to employ a seasoned, professional SEO firm like Web.com Search Agency. Avoid the trap of cloaking a website and other shady optimization techniques. Call 1-877-Rank321.
Tags: internet cloaking, search engine cloaking, website cloaking
