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Cloaking: SEO Black Hat Techniques

Search Engine Optimisation: What Not To Do

What is Cloaking?

Cloaking is the technical term for an SEO (search engine Optimisation) method where the content offered to the search engine gatherer (or ‘spider’) is different from the one given to the user’s browser. A different version for different readers. There are very few valid reasons for doing this, but one is to deliver content which the search engines could not cover without a very long wait, such as Flash.

Why is Cloaking used?

Cloaking is often used as a technique to increase the ranking of the site in question: it can also be used to trick a user into visiting a site (and downloading the content) which is not the same as the search engine description. Some search engines are likely to ban sites which have cloaking systems in use.

However, because cloaking is able to slip past the search engine spiders, many webmasters feel that cloaking is justified, since it reduces download time. This is a tenuous excuse! Some say cloaking enables webmasters to create a page of content for the browser user and a separate page for the spiders to consume speeding up download times. Many of the most popular sites on the web use cloaking systems of one kind or another – even Amazon uses them – but they have never been banned from a search engine as a consequence.

There are differing opinions on whether cloaking is a good idea or not. Those opposed to it see cloaking as a lure, drawing in unwilling users to sites they didn’t search for and don’t necessarily want to see. Supporters feel that cloaking is necessary so that the webmaster can protect content and keep download times within a suitable range. They also point out that cloaking is a way to prevent the high-ranking pages’ code being stolen by others.

In essence, cloaking keeps the web page content free of extra code, and allows the highly optimised pages to be seen only by the search engines. However it is an unnecessary way of accomplishing this task as good programming, such as style sheets, do the same job without risking penalties much more efficiently.

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