SEO Step By Step Guide– 129. Cloaking is a Serious Search Engine Violation

We have always been advising in our blog posts to stay away from all types of black hat tricks. Black hat tricks will lead us to our own peril. One of the serious violations against search engines is cloaking. Whether you are working on your own on your website’s SEO or hiring a SEO company to optimize your website, make sure that your website does not use cloaking as an SEO strategy. Cloaking is the process of delivering content based on the nature of the visitor. Originally this was used to serve contextual content to the visitors based on the IP, but this has been twisted today to deceive the search engines.
At times we may have to serve content on our websites based on the origin of the website visitor. This was achieved by the serving content based on the IP. The same technique is used to deceive the search engines. Using server side scripting entirely different content is presented to the search engine spiders. When the visitor is a human visitor, then different content will be displayed. The idea here is to manipulate the search engine spiders while indexing the site to get better ranking in the search results.

It is not allowed to deliver search engines with content that is not present in the pages or content that cannot be viewed by the human visitors. A number of pornographic sites use this technique to get listed in the search results and at the same time saving themselves from getting banned. Search engines do not approve this kind of deceptive approach. So they sanction heavy penalty for websites that use cloaking with the intention of manipulating the search engines. Your website will be delisted from the search results and will sink in to abyss once you are found to be cheating using cloaking.

It has to be noted that cloaking as a black hat SEO strategy is dying out and it is not a popular method as there are number of other progressive techniques available for the webmasters to get good ranking in a legitimate way. However, the sanctions against cloaking is still as rigorous as it used to be. Never unnecessarily subject your website to undue risks because it is not worth the risk. There are good risks and bad risks; so if you are taking risks for your website and its online performance, it should be good risks. Bad risks will mean cheap SEO tactics. You should not use cloaking as it is not even a popular black hat technique these days. When the proponents of cloaking as an SEO strategy is not supporting this method anymore, you should not go for cloaking. Always use clean SEO strategies and it will give you peace of mind.

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