What is Cloaking?
Cloaking is an SEO technique that is deceptive to search engines and users, aligning with black hat SEO and being against Google search engine guidelines.
The concept of cloaking has two definitive part;
- Firstly, Cloaked pages show content to search engines (crawlers) for indexing and ranking purposes.
- Secondly, a different set of content or resources is displayed to the users and optimised for engagement.
An Example: A page displayed to search engines promoting men’s clothing, yet redirects users to online gambling or adult content.
This practice violates Google search guidelines and can quickly lead to manual actions being taken against your website.
How does cloaking work?
So, as mentioned above, the concept of cloaking is used to deliver two sets of content on a page – one based on the user, the other based on search engine manipulation.
The search engine bot is delivered content designed to generate rankings, often keyword stuffed and with a sole goal to increase traffic volume through to the page.
The second is the user-experienced content…
This is often more user-friendly and different content from which the page has targeted rankings — and it is not relevant to the original search query.
Why cloaking in SEO is a risk
Search engines have strict guidelines within their platforms, and cloaking is against them.
Deceptive content, manipulating rankings & ultimately cloaking content are against search engine guidelines & Google’s search engine guidelines.
Cloaking and being flagged for cloaking in search can have severe consequences…
Anything from a decrease in rankings to removal from the search index or worse, manual action on the website potentially blacklisting the site entirely from search. This means the loss of all rankings in SERPs.
How is cloaking detected?
Cloaking is generally identified by comparing the indexed content against the served rendered page content in Google’s cached results. This is a simple process that Google’s crawlers now undertake and can identify content that is trying to manipulate both rankings and users by leveraging content cloaking.
