Cloaking

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In simple words, cloaking means covering or concealing
something. In search engine optimization, cloaking happens when the search
engine is presented with a different view of the website while the user is
presented another view. Cloaking is a complete NO from the search engine’s side
and webmasters practicing any form of cloaking are at a higher risk of getting
their sites deindexed any time. The moment search engine are able to detect
cloaking, it deindexes the site from its database.

Cloaking Explained (Image credit:- Quickinformations)

How Cloaking is
done?


Cloaking can be done by any one of the following ways:-
  •          Delivering content based on the ip of the user.
  •          Delivering content based on the User agent HTTP
    of the requesting user.

How to determine
cloaking?


Identifying any form of cloaking is simple. When you enter
any search query, search engines displays a set of results. Under every result,
there is a link to “cached”. You can click on the cached page to determine
which version of the site is being displayed to the search engines. When you
click on the main result link you will be directed to a different version of
the page. You may also check cloaking with the help of Google toolbar. Visit
the url of the site which you want to check. Now click on the cached link on
the Google toolbar. If you see a different version of the site than what you
were previously seeing, then it is an example of cloaking.

Here is a video from Matt Cutts explaining about Cloaking:-

If you think somebody out there is spamming the search engines then you may report it to Google here :- Report Spam to Google


Also See:- 

Black Hat Seo
Page Highjacking
Seo Tutorial
Seo Analysis
Content Curation
List of Seo Documents

One Response

  1. Shaaa . . . October 31, 2012