Why Cloaking is Bad

Cloaking is one of the sneakiest black hat SEO techniques. Some SEO professionals use this method when they optimize their websites or their client’s websites. This is definitely an underhanded SEO techniques, and not that evident to visitors, but Google and other search engines will discover it and penalize those who cloak their websites. Severe ranking drops can be seen among sites found guilty of cloaking. So what exactly is this practice?

First, in white hat optimization, the content presented to the visitor isthe same as the content that is presented when the search engine spider visits your site. This content is delivered based on the User-Agent HTTP header, which tells the user what the page is about (or should, if properly optimized.) The IP address is also used to deliver visitor based content. However, if different content is delivered to the search engines using server side scripting, and what teh spiders see is markedly different than what visitors see, then this is considered cloaking.

Some claim cloaking is essential for serving targeted content. This is not true – there are plenty of white hat ways to achieve this. Cloaking as far too used to trick visitors and attract them to a particular site by getting rankings from search engines based on spidered content – then redirecting visitors to a completed different page. Pornographic and gsmbling sites will often employ this method to get innocent visitors into their site.

All major search engines consider cloaking to be black hat. Sites found to be using cloaking or who are reported as using cloaking will be investidagated, and subsequently removed from SE listings.

When you hire a SEO company, try to make sure you are hiring one that shuns black hat practices! Cloaking should never be an option as they optimize your website; your site banned by the use of this method, and it is so not worth it!  Though it might be tempting to  use cloaking to get better ranking and quick traffic, you can ruin your website’s reputation among the search engines, perhaps causing your site to become worthless.