What is Cloaking in SEO & Its Types

What is Cloaking in SEO?

Cloaking in SEO is a method used to serve users content or information that is different from what is presented to search engine crawlers (i.e. spiders or bots) to improve a website’s search engine rankings for certain keywords.

What are the different types of cloaking and how is it done?

– User-Agent Cloaking – IP based cloaking – JavaScript cloaking – HTTP_REFERER cloaking – HTTP Accept-language header cloaking

User-Agent Cloaking:

A user-agent is a program (a software agent) that operates on behalf of a user. Example, a web browser acts as user-agent that fetches website information on an operating system. When you key in a query, the browser sends a code to the server that will distinguish/identify the user-agent.

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IP-based cloaking

Every user accessing a website has an IP address based on their location and internet service. In this, the users are redirected to the desired page through a page with good SERP ranking and high traffic volume.

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For this, you can use the reverse DNS records (available in the cPanel of your hosting company) to identify the IP address and set up .htaccess to redirect them. This is the most preferred method of cloaking.

JavaScript cloaking

This happens when users with JavaScript-enabled browsers are served one version of the content while users who have JavaScript disabled (like search engines) are served another version of a website.

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HTTP_REFERER cloaking

In this method, the HTTP_REFERER header of the requester is checked and based on that, a cloaked or uncloaked version of the website is served.

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HTTP Accept-language header cloaking

This technique checks the HTTP Accept-Language header of the user and based on the match result, a specific version of the website is presented. In simple terms, if the HTTP Accept-Language header is of a search engine, then a cloaked version of the website is served.

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What are the common ways to implement cloaking in SEO?

 Invisible or Hidden text

This can be done by adding text in the same colour as that of the background so that it is not visible to the human eye. – 

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Flash-based Websites

We know Flash is not recommended as per SEO guidelines. But some websites cannot avoid it. So rather than remaking the entire website in plain HTML, they create content-rich webpages and provide them to search engine crawlers and the flash pages to visitors.

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HTML Rich Websites

A good SEO technique requires having a “TEXT to HTML ratio” that is as high as possible. In other words, the web page should have more text (content) as compared to your HTML tags.

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HTML Rich Websites

But if someone is writing short articles or posts, your text to HTML ratio will be very low. To avoid re-designing their website in such scenarios, people choose cloaking to meet SEO guidelines.

Replacement of Java Scripts

Here, one can use JavaScript to show content to a non-JavaScript enabled user that matches the textual information within a Flash or other multimedia element.

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Does ‘White Hat Cloaking’ exist?

Matt Cutts has said: “White hat cloaking is a contradiction in terms of Google. We’ve never had to make an exception for “white hat” cloaking. If someone tells you that — that’s dangerous.”

A Frequently asked question is – is there anything called White Hat Cloaking?

The search engine keeps updating their algorithm frequently and if you use cloaking, they will sooner or later find it out and may permanently ban your website from being indexed. In fact, Google “blacklisted” a German car manufacturer, BMW, for breaking its guidelines in February 2006.

What is Google’s penalty for cloaking?

In the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry, cloaking is considered to be a black hat technique that violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. If you ask us whether you should do cloaking to trick crawlers and rank high, our answer will be NO, search engines don’t like to be tricked.

Should cloaking be done in SEO?

– Displaying or revealing keywords only to crawlers and not to users because crawlers can help get a higher page rank – Providing different forms of media to the users while only offering an HTML text to search engines

What is cloaking in SEO, with example?