Cloaking

Cloaking is a technique used by some websites to deliver one page to a search engine for indexing while serving an entirely different page to everyone else. The search engine thinks it is selecting a prime match to its request based on the meta tags that the site administrator has input. However, the search result is misleading because the meta tags do not correspond to what actually exists on the page. Search engines ban cloaked websites. 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.

Main characteristic of cloaking is that it employs a different page delivered to search engines than the one displayed to visitors to the Web site; its only purpose being to hide content from search engines.

Many of those who employ cloaking techniques argue that they are presenting something different to a search engine rather than hiding something from it. The end result remains the same: the page presented to the search engine is different than the one anticipated by the visitor.

When building, implementing or optimizing a website, you should always avoid at all costs any form of cloaking, since those techniques are strongly forbidden by most major search engines today, with very good reasons.

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