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What is Cloaking?
Cloaking or word cloak when seen in the dictionary, means something that covers or conceals. But when in reference to SEO, it is considered as a technique to have better indexing.
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Source: https://www.searchenginegenie.com/101-articles/101-article%20images/Cloaking/Cloaking-in-SEO-terms.jpg
According to Google, Cloaking is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Whatever result they have expected differs from the provided result.Example of Cloaking
A page of images or Flash to users is been shown while you were serving a page of HTML text to search engines. Keywords or text is inserted only when the user-agent requests the page is a search engine and not human visitor.
To improve the rankings by search engines by making them think the content on the page is different than it really is, cloaking is done. A spamdexing technique (search engine spam, search engine poisoning)is often it is referred as, to try to trick the search engines to give higher rankings to site which are relevant. Page cloaking and web cloaking, you must have heard these terms.
Source: https://static.tildacdn.com/tild3937-6163-4461-a436-383364353632/ApplicationFrameHost.png
How is Cloaking done?
Cloaking is done by delivering the content. The content is based on the IP address or User-agent HTTP header of the user which is requesting the page. Whenever a search engine spider is identified, a different version of the webpage is delivered by the side script. Different versions could be that contains content and not present on the visible page or the other that is present but is not searchable.
Cloaking in seo is to deceive. They display the page which is not to be displayed just to have a higher ranking. This is termed as Black Hat seo, as stated above. It can be a functional technique as well used for informing the search engines of content that they would not be able to locate. It is embedded in video or certain Adobe Flash components or any other non-textual containers. Better methods of accessibility are available now, so cloaking is no longer necessary for regular seo. But just in order to have better rankings both of them are displayed differently. For Google, it’s a violation and is not recommended to do so often.
Different Types of Cloaking
User-Agent Cloaking
It is a program that operates on behalf of the user for example a web browser acts as a user-agent which fetches information of a website. When you type a word for enquiry then the browser will identify the user- agent. Now, the cloak content will be presented if the user-agent is a crawler.
IP based cloaking
This cloaking is the most preferred one as here, users are directly redirected to the desired page by having a page as a medium having good SERP ranking and a higher traffic volume.
JavaScript cloaking
This takes place when JavaScript-enabled browser users are being served with one version of a content on the other hand those users who are having disabled JavaScript are being served another version of a website.
HTTP_REFERER cloaking
Here, when one requests HTTP_REFERER header then it is checked first and after that based on it an uncloaked version or a cloaked version of the website is presented.
HTTP Accept-language header cloaking
Here, user’s HTTP Accept-Language header is checked and based on the matching result, website’s specific version is presented. Understanding it in simpler terms as if the HTTP Accept-Language header is a search engine then the website which will be presented will be a cloaked version.
Common Ways to Implement Cloaking In SEO
Hidden or Invisible Text
This is done by adding the textual part in the same colour as that of the background so it becomes invisible to human eye.
Flash Based Websites
As per SEO guidelines it is not recommended but many do it by providing flash pages to visitors. The webpage created is rich in content.
HTML Rich Websites
People choose cloaking strategy when their ratio of text to HTML tags are very low.
Replacements of Java Scripts
In this technique one can use a JavaScript to display content to a non-JavaScript enabled user but that has to match the textual informative part within a flash.