Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique which shows one kind of content to the google crawler and shows another type of different content to the users. Cloaking is mainly done to increase the search engine ranking by misleading the google spiders by showing different content to them.
Showing certain kinds of HTML text to the google crawlers and showing some image or infographics to the end-user is one of the examples of Cloaking.
Is cloaking good for SEO?
No, Cloaking is considered as a Black hat SEO, and it’s an illegal practice. Google may even permanently penalize the website for Cloaking. Cloaking is not an effective SEO technique that leads to google penalty. Cloaking is basically lying to search engine for better ranking.
Does White Hat Cloaking exist?
The most common question is that – Does white hat cloaking exists? As per Matt Cuts, there is no such white hat cloaking, and it doesn’t exist. If someone says about the white hat cloaking, then they are giving dangerous SEO ideas.
How to do Cloaking?
Now, How Cloaking is done? How the website delivers different content to the various users?
On the internet, every user or a person is named with the IP address. In the Apache server, there is a module called “mod_rewrite.” This module is mainly used for Cloaking. The “mod_rewrite” module scans all the IP address of the user visiting the website. If the module finds the IP of the google spider, it will deliver a specific type of content. If it considers the standard IP of a computer or tablet, it will provide different content. This type of giving different based on the IP address is called IP cloaking.
If you are looking for a content cloaking, then you are increasing the chance of getting penalized from the search engine.
Common Cloaking practices
There are different practices that webmasters use to do Cloaking in their websites. Some of them are listed below
Hidden or Invisible text
Hidden text is one of the methods of content cloaking. In this type, specific text will not be visible if someone visits the website. This is simply done by maintaining the text and background with the same colour. This type of Cloaking doesn’t require IP tracking. This is mainly done to rank the original content for different keywords by keyword stuffing.
Adding text and keywords in the header dropdown is also a hidden text, but this kind of navigational bars are not considered as corrupt practices.
Flash-based websites
As we all know that the flash-based websites are not suitable for SEO, but still there are many websites with user flash to deliver the videos and animations to the end-user. These webmasters will write a full HTML webpage and show that to the google and for the user it displays the flash-based websites
Email Cloaking
While drafting an email, the process of hiding the sender mail id and address so that the receiver cannot find who sends the email. This is called email cloaking.
HTML rich websites
A good SEO optimized content should have more text as compared to the link. The “TEXT to HTML” ratio should be high. If someone writes a short content, and if he wanted to give more credit to a particular website, he would have a lot of links in that quick content.
In that case, the “TEXT to HTML” will be small and so the webmasters will use cloaking technique to show TEXT rich webpages to google and shows the other page to the user.
Gallery websites
Basically, Image gallery websites will have a lot of images on a single page. Since google crawlers won’t crawl the photos, the webmaster uses a cloaking technique to show the keywords to google, and they will show the images to the users.