What is Cloaking - How it is Done

It has not been a matter of undiscovered the fact that the technique of SEO otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization is highly responsible for making an online business reach the heights and getting successful in a matter of a few days. If you are well aware of the ways and implementations of the SEO, then you must have heard about Cloaking, and in the case, if you haven't, we are explaining all about it here.

Cloaking is, of course, a Search Engine optimization technique through which the content or information is presented in a different to what the web crawlers do. To be said in simple terms, cloaking is a specially programmed to display different contents or information to the regular users twisting the search engine rankings. By this time, you must have understood that cloaking is the illegal practice and comes under Black Hat SEO technique and the practice of black hat SEO technique can ban you from getting indexed.

Cloaking is one by to improve the search engine rankings of a particular website by misleading the search engine crawlers or robots and it make the search engine or crawlers to think that page is different from what is appears. It is considered as the spam indexing technique that creates a hoax for the search engines.

The world of the internet identifies the device by its IP address. Using cloaking means that you need to target the IP address and deliver the results to the IP addresses. It is done by modifying a file htaccess.

Now, you might think of the type of contents that you can show in different ways to the users and, of course, to the search engine crawlers. A search engine index and rank a page on a higher rank based on the titles, Meta tags, and determining other SEO techniques. So, based on these factors, the most common practices of cloaking include:

This is one of the most common approaches, and webmaster adds information in the content like inserting keywords, overwriting of the in a manner that it is hidden from the users. To do this, webmasters uses the same color to write the information on the background to make it invisible to the users.

Flash is not regarded by the SEO techniques, but despite the fact, there are many websites that have been created and developed on the flash. When one is building a website on flash, there are lots of flashes being used, and one cannot avoid its uses. So, webmasters create websites that are filled with contents and provide it to the search engine crawlers, and they provide the flash pages to the users.

When doing e-mail campaign or distribution, cloaking is used to hide the information of the sender, so the recipients do not get to know anything about the senders.

Cloaking can be done by inserting specific keywords when a user is searching for something in particular after confirming that the user is human and not a robot.

Giving the search engines a page of HTML text and meanwhile showing the result of images and flash to the searchers. But, you must keep in mind keep in mind that when you are implementing the cloaking technique, you are violating the rules of Google and you may end up getting banned from the search engines.