Cloaking

Cloaking is a black-hat SEO technique where a website shows one version of a page to search engine crawlers and a completely different one to human visitors.

This means that the crawler will see content that’s been purposely crafted to rank well, while an actual visitor will view something completely different, which may instead be an advert, a different product, or simply content that’s completely irrelevant to what got the page ranked in the first place.

Why is this regarded as a black-hat tactic? Because it deliberately deceives search engines about what a page contains and is a strict violation of Google’s guidelines.

How Does Cloaking Work?

The mechanics behind cloaking rely on detecting who or what is requesting the page. Setups could serve up different content based on the user agent, identifying the Googlebot and feeding it the optimised version instead. Or, cloaking could be based on IP address, recognising the ranges search engines crawl from.

Although both visitors and crawlers request the same URL, they can receive different responses.

Because of this, website owners can rank for terms that the real page doesn’t deserve by hiding the actual content on the page from the search engine.

Why Use Cloaking?

Those deploying black-hat SEO strategies use cloaking for many different types of deception by ranking pages for popular keywords that have nothing to do with the actual content displayed to visitors.

The approach means that they can effectively hide spammy, adult, or illegal content behind innocent-looking pages or disguise thin affiliate or scam pages behind something that’s posing as legitimate.

In any case, the searcher is the victim, and clicking a result expecting one thing before being presented with something else entirely can be extremely damaging for user trust in your website.

Google considers cloaking a form of manipulation, creating guideline stipulations to ensure that it’s stamped out. After all, it can fundamentally undermine the trust that people place in search results.

Penalties for Cloaking

Because of Google’s strong stance against cloaking, violators are punished heavily with manual penalties or the outright removal of websites from their index.

Unlike in the case of some grey-area tactics where some margins can be pushed in debatable ways, cloaking remains an unambiguous form of SEO manipulation and Google has no tolerance for it.

As a result, there’s no version of cloaking that’s advisable to use if you’re a website owner looking to organically boost your rankings.

Safe Practices

At this stage, it’s important to note that some acceptable SEO practices can look like cloaking but are fundamentally different. So if you’re worried that you may be inadvertently using underhanded techniques, this may not be the case.

For instance, if you choose to display different content based on the location or native language of a user in a transparent way while serving everyone the genuinely relevant version of your pages, that is perfectly fine.

Similarly, delivering personalised content for logged-in users or displaying a mobile-optimised layout isn’t cloaking. This is because there’s no deception regarding what your page actually is.

If you’re unsure about whether or not you could be cloaking, ask yourself whether you’re showing search engine crawlers something different from what human users see as part of your SEO strategy.

As long as Google’s crawlers are getting a consistent and honest experience, you’ll have nothing to worry about. If, however, you’ve set your website up to deceive, then you’re risking severe ramifications.