What is Cloaking? Why Should You Not Cloak a Web Site?

Cloaking is a method used by experts who practice black hat SEO to fool the search engines. In other words, the search engines are shown one kind of version of a website while the users visiting the site do not see the same page. This type of practice was more prevalent around ten years ago when Google’s filters were not as adept at catching the offenders. Typically, cloaking was used when a web page was not ranking all that high. Therefore, another page was developed for the bots to crawl.

Fortunately, anyone who wants to practice cloaking today will usually get caught, which really would not be worth it, considering that most pages can obtain a ranking even when less popular keywords are used. Plus, Google is well aware of the practice, so to take the chance of getting banned by using this approach would be unconscionable if not foolish.