What is Cloaking :
We have heard about SEO (Search engine optimization) which helps to increase more visibility of a website, web page to users of a web search engine. This is the process of optimizing your online content so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.
Cloaking is to encourage a website‘s search engine rank on a few certain keywords. We can say this is the black hat SEO technique in which it shows two different types of content, one is for users and the other is for search engines. This is just hiding the data in a webpage or website from a search engine bot.
How two types of content will be visible for users and search engines?
Suppose, the 1st one is for visitors who are actually visiting the website and the second one would be for the search engines robots. I.e., a human reading the website would see different content or information than the search engine crawlers reading the website. The main use or reason to develop this technique is to rank the pages well in search engines. Also, this is useful for better indexing.
Image 1 :
- Example we can say , serving a page of website text to search engines, while showing a page of different images to users.
- What Google says about Cloaking ? : Cloaking is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and rules. This is not proper way . Whatever output or result they have expected differs from the provided result. Hence though it is challenging, Google team search engine algorithms are very active to search such type of Cloaking.
So friends I will suggest it better to avoid this technique.
How is Clocking done :
While delivering the content, cloaking can be implemented or achieved. Cloaking in SEO is to deceive. To achieve Cloaking, content which is based on the IP address or User-agent HTTP header of the user who is requesting the page, can be delivered. So whenever the search engine spider is identified, a different version of the webpage is delivered by the side script.
Cloaking in SEO is useful for different purposes as explained above. Just to display the page which is not to be displayed just to have a higher ranking.
Cloaking is no longer necessary for regular SEO. But just in order to have better rankings.
Types of Cloaking :
- User-Agent Cloaking: You might have idea that ‘User agent’ is a software. This act on behalf of a user. Lets see common use of this . Example : A web browser telling website details /information about the browser and operating system. There are other uses of them “user agent”.
Example: An email reader is a mail user agent.
- IP based cloaking: We all know that , IP (Internet protocol) address is a number or numerical Devices which are connected to computer network can be assigned by IP address, which uses the Internet protocol for communication. This is a method of presenting various contents based on determining IP address.
IP-based clocking example: Search engines with certain IP addresses will be shown at one version of a web page and all other IP addresses will be shown another version.
- HTTP Accept –language header cloaking: Using this technique version of the website can be presented. This technique identifies the HTTP Accept language header of the user. Once this is done ,accordingly the version of the website is presented.
Example: Let’s see cloaking here. If the HTTP Accept-Language header is of a search engine then observed, then the cloaked version of the website is presented as another version of the website is presented.
- JS Cloaking: Sometimes you might have came across , when we see Java script enabled browsers are shown one version to us while users with java script turned off are shown another version of a website.
- HTTP_REFERER cloaking: This technique is useful to identify the HTTP_REFERER header of the requester and based on that cloaked or uncloaked version of the website is presented.
- Cloaking Emails : When we want to send emails to single or multiple users , this approach is utilized and the sender name are hidden . So the recipient receives the email but is unfamiliar with who sent it.
- HTML reach website : Company always looks for a higher TEXT to HTML ratio for site. It is a highly proficient SEO practice . It helps you to understand that your site should have more content in comparison with HTML tags.
What are Disadvantages of Cloaking :
- Loss of page Rank
- Reduction of Page Rank
- Search Engine Result page Position loss
- Index banning or bar of websites
Conclusion :
Better to avoid Cloaking. Now Google is coming with new and talented search engines algorithms that are more intelligent than Cloaking techniques. Search Engine often changes their algorithms in order to avoid and stop cloaking and other techniques that create a negative user experience. Once your cloaking applied site becomes a victim, I.e if they will find your site is using this technique, your site will be banned and dropped from their index.
There are many examples of this. We all know that search giant Google has blacklisted German car manufacturer BMW for breaching its guidelines in Feb 2006.