Welcome to the SEO tutorials, and we are covering the Blackhat SEO. Today we will discuss what is cloaking?, and why it is a bad practice to use it. One should not follow or practice the Black hat SEO, if they want to see their blog as a successful blog. The cloaking is nothing but a mechanism used by the some websites to show a different page to the world and submit the different page for indexing. Black hat SEO is not a good practice to use, but still people discuss whether the cloaking is ethical or not.
Cloaking Meaning – Let’s Define
Cloaking meaning stands for fooling the search engine spiders by providing the things they want to rank high a website. The search engine will look for the meta tags for its searched query, and if found, then it will be shown as a search result to the user.
When user will click on it, then they will see different content other than mentioned in the meta tags. You can consider it like a doorway page. If caught by the major search engines, then they will remove that page or probably give you the harsh punishment of blacklisting of your entire site.
Read: What are doorway pages? And why one should not use it?
Cloaking Meaning with Example
Now let us understand the cloaking meaning with some examples by the google support includes:
- Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users
- Inserting text or keywords into a page only when the User-agent requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor
Pros of Cloaking
- You can create web pages for an individual search engine to acquire a top position in the search results. Why individual pages? Because different search engines have different parameters to consider a page for a ranking.
- Since the content is for the end user, you can forget the SEO friendly themes or design. Why? Because the cloaking mechanism will give you more SEO marks.
- You can hide the Html code from the competitors. Once you will perform well in search results, then your competitors will try to catch your keywords density, frequency and etc. Now cloaking will help you to hide some secrets.
Cons of black hat seo cloaking
- Banned – If found guilty of black hat SEO activities, then your website/blog will be banned from the most of the search engines. Better not to use the shortcuts to overcome your competitors.
- Time waster – Yes, the practice of the cloaking can be considered as a time waster as well. Why? Because now a day’s search engine not only relying on the meta tags or the keywords. The result will be the sweet penalty by the spiders, and hence, you wasted time on doing black hat SEO techniques.
Conclusion
We have just covered what is Cloaking?, and its pros and cons. Being a good adviser, we will not at all recommend such activities to our readers. Because probably after some time you will feel proud on your decision of not doing black hat seo activities. Why don’t you work hard on your content or write a quality content, and later promote your blog to the world in the white hat manners? Sure, it will take time, but you will not be penalized by the search engines.