Articles >> What is Cloaking and Why you Shouldn't do It

What is Cloaking and Why you Shouldn't do It by Ultimate Creators

Cloaking is the method of returning altered information to a search engine that is crawling the website. It is done to fool the search engine bots to think that the site contains a different content than what it really does. A human reading the website would be viewing different content than what a search engine bot would. The main purpose behind doing so is to improve the search engine ranking of the website.

If a search engine catches on to a site that is cloaking then it would automatically remove the site from its listing. It can even blacklist the site for sometime so that it is not indexed at all. This is because cloaking completely fools the algorithm of the search engine that would determine where the site would be placed in the search engine ranks. If the search engine is fooled by cloaking and the user sees a very different site from what he has searched for then the search engine is not doing its job well enough.

This brings up an argument weather personalization is cloaking or not. For example, some websites might use geo-IP tracking to deliver information like weather or news that is related to your area or localization. However the information that would reach a search engine would be completely different. This is however, not done to improve search engine rankings but rather aid the local visitors to the site. This is not considered cloaking because the content that is delivered is the same without discriminating weather the visitor is a human or a search engine bot. if the local search engine bot of a website would go through that particular website then it would get the same results displayed. Hence this is not fooling the search engine spiders and will not get blacklisted.

Why cloaking is shunned by search engines is because it hurts the effectiveness of a search engine. By cloaking, a site that is irrelevant to the content that is searched for will get a higher page rank and hence will end up as spam on the search engine results. Also if you are using cloaking to increase your website rank, you might eventually end up with a high page rank but after a few days you are bound to get caught. As a result, your website will get blacklisted.

There are many optimization firms that engage in cloaking and tell you many reasons why it fine to do so. Some common excuses are that the content is still relevant or that the HTML codes need to be protected. However, all these are just excuses. You will eventually get caught and therefore it is best to avoid such methods.