Cloaking 101

Cloaking: Nefarious form of Black Hat

Of all the various methods of getting a website to show further up in search results, cloaking is the one  that’s pretty much unanimously regarded as ‘Black Hat.’ There are some pertinent reasons why this is so.

But first, what exactly is cloaking? Here’s Google’s definition:

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.

The Penalty for Cloaking

If you are caught cloaking by the search engines (it’s actually more a case of when than if), you will be immediately removed from the major search engines (and most others too).  If it’s bad enough you could also be blacklisted. This means that not only will you have to begin again with marketing your site, but you will also have to purchase another domain name. That’s as bad as it gets with a search engine penalty.

If you are a website owner and you hire an SEO consultant, be absolutely sure about their intentions and their ethics. And never buy software that claims to be able to cloak your pages or links or anything else. It’s simply not worth the huge risk involved.

What’s Left When You’re Busted?

And if by some miserable chance you were cloaking for a client you will have a reputation in tatters and may even be the subject of a lawsuit.

So why do people insist on using cloaking? Personally I have a hard time understanding why anyone would take the risks when there are so many other ethical ways to optimize your site that don’t involve cheating the search engines.

It is important to understand that the search engines are there to provide a service and if they turn a blind eye to sites that try to cheat them they will be ruining their own business. So who can blame them for coming down so hard?