Thread: What is Cloaking ?

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.

Some examples of cloaking include:

• Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users.
• Serving different content to search engines than to users.

If your site contains elements that aren't crawlable by search engines (such as rich media files other than Flash, JavaScript, or images), you shouldn't provide cloaked content to search engines. Rather, you should consider visitors to your site who are unable to view these elements as well. For instance:

• Provide alt text that describes images for visitors with screen readers or images turned off in their browsers.
• Provide the textual contents of JavaScript in a noscript tag.

Ensure that you provide the same content in both elements (for instance, provide the same text in the JavaScript as in the noscript tag). Including substantially different content in the alternate element may cause Google to take action on the site.


Source URLs:Cloaking, sneaky Javascript redirects, and doorway pages - Webmasters/Site owners Help

Nice explanation. This technique is so gone already; only newbies would be tempted to use it I guess. Good to know though. Thanks.

Nice Information..thanks for sharing..

wow cool nice post buddy thanks for sharing!!!

The information provided here worth on cloaking. The explanation is correct with its value. Its really helpful for the terms who are not aware about this. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for valuable time and reply...

Nice piece of information you gathered here pal.

Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to 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. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed.

This is one among the wrong tactics. Well explained Mit.

yaa nice point share by mit cloaking is not good for Search Engine optimization i never use it...

In short cloaking means to determine who visits the website and then presenting the applicable visitor with the site content relevant to their needs. In other words serving Google bot with a different page than for example the Yahoo! spider is cloaking. This will definitely result in a banning of the relevant site in a search engine, if discovered. Enabling actual human visitors to view only information relevant to their needs is not considdered cloaking. Cloaking's main objective is fooling search engines

ahh so cloaking is an old black hat i thought many site owners are still using it

If you want to learn more about cloaking, you can check it here:

Code:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking

Great information to share... Very informative, I learned something from it...

Originally Posted by mit

Nice piece of information you gathered here pal.

Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to 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. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed.

Comprehensive and clear information. Thanks.

If you take a look at the forums posts and te ideas people are expressing about such blackhat techniques, you will notice that it is a few years search engines and especially Google have discovered the tricks and they are not working any more.