Everything about Cloaking and its impact on SEO

Arguments are always there between webmasters if Cloaking is a recommended technique. Most of them strictly go against it while few support it saying, “It doesn’t harm if done carefully.” Reality is, Cloaking basically tries to trick search engines and any method trying to do this is not legit at all.

Definition: Cloaking is the process of showing one page to search engines and displaying totally different page to searchers. Search engines design their ranking algorithms that work on META tags, titles, inbound & outbound links to rank the webpages.

Cloaked pages satisfy all the META tag texts, titles, headings, links formalities to be ranked high in the SERPs. So they easily get rid of search engines spiders to get good place in the search engine index. But after the visitor lands on the page s/he doesn’t get the accurate solution to their query.

When users don’t get what they were actually searching, it’s a bad user experience both on the website and the search engines. That’s why search engines never ever like to be tricked. They always believe in providing the accurate search results to the searchers.

How to detect a cloaked page: The leading search engine Google always provides a link ‘Cached’ just near the search result. After clicking this link you will get the webpage that’s actually indexed by Google. Compare this cached page with the page displayed in the SERP. If they differ, then the page is said to be cloaked.

Why Cloaking is used?

Cloaking is done by webmasters primarily for SEO purpose. However there are situations when the site owners have to cloak their pages. Think of the situation when a webmaster develops a flashy attractive site, yet s/he wants SEO for it. It’s well known that search engines don’t usually prefer flash and image gallery based websites.

Here the webmaster finds no way other than cloaking the webpages. With the help of cloaking s/he shows the flashy version of the page to the user to grab their attention. At the same time another cloaked page is delivered to the search engine index that’s purely text-based.

Another case of cloaking suggests, some webmasters follow cloaking for certain selected pages just because they don’t want to reveal their optimization techniques to other webmasters. So they intentionally show one page to search engines and a different page to public.

How it’s done?

Cloaking is accomplished by making some changes in the ‘.htaccess’ file. There is a module named as “mod_rewrite” in the Apache server. Webmasters and cloaking experts actually apply cloaking methods in the ‘.htaccess’ file by the help of “mod_rewrite” module.

Webmasters collect the IP addresses of search engines and user-agents such as Googlebots. Then the total information is supplied to the “mod_rewrite” module. If the module finds the IP address or the user-agent is of a search engine, then it delivers the cloaked page. And if the IP address or the user-agent doesn’t belong to any search engine, then the normal webpage is delivered by the module.

Cloaking is never a recommended technique:

Cloaking is generally regarded as an unethical tactic that tries to fool search engines and page visitors. By using this technique you might get good ranking for a very short period. But keep in mind sooner or later you will be detected by search engines. Once the search engine finds any cloaked page in your site, it bans the whole site for a longer time.