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?
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What a great share, my knowledge in SEO is very broad. I find it is nice to see very informative blogs like these. Thanks.
and if you get caught using this on affiliates, say goodbye to affiliate account. you can try it just to know the effect but making it your business is not good.
you dont get it… it costs virtually nothing to put up a cloaked site… let alone thousands. there is nothing to lose.
you dont get it… it costs virtually nothing to put up a cloaked site… let alone thousands. there is nothing to lose.
Ok, I know it's been quite a while since this post was written, but I still wanted to give you my opinion.
There's another reason why cloaking is so bad. If you have a real website that's not cheating the search engines you will get hits from all the pages involved. If someone clicks on your page in Google they will end up on the page specific for the topic they searched for. This is usually not the case with cloaking. For the most part, with a cloaked website the visitor will end up on the first page – which is pretty bad.
Also, to succeed with cloaking, you have to put links to your cloaked sites, mainly from spam blogs. But if you still have to create spam blogs – why not create real content instead?
See my point?
Good article!
Ok, I know it's been quite a while since this post was written, but I still wanted to give you my opinion.
There's another reason why cloaking is so bad. If you have a real website that's not cheating the search engines you will get hits from all the pages involved. If someone clicks on your page in Google they will end up on the page specific for the topic they searched for. This is usually not the case with cloaking. For the most part, with a cloaked website the visitor will end up on the first page – which is pretty bad.
Also, to succeed with cloaking, you have to put links to your cloaked sites, mainly from spam blogs. But if you still have to create spam blogs – why not create real content instead?
See my point?
Good article!