When Does Cloaking Become A Black Hat Strategy?

Cloaking has been considered a black hat SEO strategy and all the search engines including Google takes serious action against websites that try to manipulate the search results through cloaking. It is going to be a tough year for websites that make use of cloaking to manipulate search engines as Google has indicated that it will investigate cloaking related issues much more closely in the first quarter of the year.

Is cloaking always a black hat strategy? Can we not use cloaking at all in our websites? When does cloaking become a black hat strategy? Before we can answer these questions we must first have a very clear understanding of cloaking.

When a website serves different contents based on the nature of the visitor, then such a website is said to use cloaking. Many websites make use of cloaking to improve their performance in the search engines by providing misleading the search engines. This is considered a manipulative technique by all the search engines and it is obviously not encouraged.

Most of the search engines do not promote such websites on their search results. Search engines will not be able to serve their internet users effectively if they cannot read the actual content of the page. Their search results will not return accurate results and thereby become an ineffective and unpopular search engine. To avoid all these problems search engines ban websites that practice cloaking from their listing.

However the question is whether cloaking is always a bad technique. A closer look at the issue will reveal that it need not necessarily be so. Today, the internet has become a highly sophisticated platform and one of the most powerful platforms too. It has come a long way from where it was few decades ago. The internet has made shrunk the entire world and the world has now become a global village. People from different parts of the world access the same website. So it has now become a need that visitors coming from different parts of the world get relevant content. Websites have started displaying content that will make more sense to the visitors and not just some static content. In order to serve visitor specific content websites need to make use of cloaking. Here the intention of cloaking is not to mislead the search engines but to serve their users better. Websites use different types of cloaking techniques to provide the users with specialized content.
As long as the websites do not differentiate the visitors based on fact whether it is a search engine bot or human visitor, we cannot consider cloaking as a black hat strategy. The differentiation should be based on other factors such as the visitor’s IP, last visited date etc to serve different content.
Search engines are far more sophisticated today and they certainly see the difference between websites that try to manipulate the search results and websites that try to serve specialized content to its users.

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