What do you mean by Cloaking?

[WoodsPainting]

What do you mean by Cloaking?

[ImpalaWardrobes]

Hello Friends,

Cloaking is a Black Hat SEO method in which content presented to the user’s web browser and search engine bot are different. The content meant for the search engine bots is filled with keywords and the user content is normal, in accordance to best SEO practices. This is done by delivering content based on IP addresses or User-Agent HTTP header of user request page.

[mariajonas]

Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page.

[RH-Calvin]

Cloaking is a technique used to deliver the content on a Web page to a search engine in such a way that different content than what is delivered to a regular human user appears on the search engine. The goal of cloaking is to boost a website's search engine rank on certain keywords.

[sulbha]

Hi Friends,
Cloaking - In simple words, serve different types of versions of your website for humans and search engines.

Black hat Technique because it violates basic search engine guidelines of serving quality content to the user. It is not advisable to apply to cloak on any website

Types of Cloaking

User-Agent Cloaking
IP based cloaking
JS cloaking
HTTP_REFERER cloaking
HTTP Accept-language header cloaking

If your site uses technologies that search engines have difficulty accessing, like JavaScript, images, or Flash, you will get a penalty in SERP.