What Is Cloaking?
Cloaking is the term given to the practice of delivering keyword-enriched content to spiders while showing different content to regular visitors. The rationale behind this approach is to deliver "optimized" content to search engines while delivering regular, unoptimized content to surfers/visitors. An example of this would be a website that has chosen to use Flash™, yet does not wish to suffer the lack of content from a spider's perspective (given that search engines cannot read Flash™), so they choose to deliver the Flash™ media only to human visitors, whereas robots see another page that's full of text and keywords.
Why It's Spam
Although this may sound like a logical and worthwhile approach, it is considered spam, because the search engine is being "fooled" by being shown content that will never be seen by users. Most search engines have devised methods to detect cloaking, and many search engines have implemented a zero tolerance approach to such activity. Google, Lycos, and Hotbot are among the many engines that will either ban a website entirely from their index or drastically reduce the rankings of any website found to be engaging is such spamming practices.
For these reasons, we highly recommend that you refrain from cloaking your website in any form. Properly optimized content is a much more effective long term approach to better rankings!!
Rate This Article
You must be signed in to rate articles.
