What is Cloaking and How Does it Affect SEO?

Cloaking is an unethical black hat SEO technique used by websites trying to manipulate their rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs). Learn more about cloaking & how it affects your website's SEO.

What is Cloaking and How Does it Affect SEO?

Cloaking is a black hat SEO technique that involves showing different content to users and search engines. It is done to insert keywords into a page only when the user agent requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor. Websites that practice black hat SEO will do this so that content is classified for a variety of terms irrelevant to their content. Spam websites often do this to prevent a search engine bot from discovering the spam content they offer to users. Cloaking increases site rankings by offering rich content with all the right keywords to bots, while organic visitors are left with ineffective content that doesn't offer them any value despite the site's rankings.

This unethical technique uses a sophisticated but dirty technology called search engine spiders. Cover-up is intentionally misleading the search engine. Google needs to know what's on your website to offer its users the best possible search results. Excessively repeating the primary target keyword (s) of your page won't help you rank. Keyword stuffing, as it is known, will almost certainly result in the opposite. Black hat seos sometimes try to manipulate a site's ranking by unnaturally including a keyword on a page.

Keyword stuffing often happens in random blocks that lie outside the main content or inside paragraphs that just don't make sense when you read them out loud. But what we're talking about here is a clear attempt to hide the text altogether, and this doesn't apply to text that's in an accordion, in tabs, or that is dynamically loaded with JavaScript. For our part, we definitely don't recommend adding hidden text to your pages. Search engine crawlers are much more sophisticated now and they understand that you are trying to enter keywords. Cloaking is a tactic that consists of offering different content or URLs to users and search engines, essentially providing a different experience in each of them.

However, similar to cloaking, black hat SEOs place sneaky redirects to trick search engines and show content that is different from what a user sees. Often, a search engine will index the original page, while users are taken to a different destination URL. Google's webmaster guidelines specifically list sneaky redirects as a black hat tactic that violates its guidelines. Black hat SEO works best for short-term profit on sites that may be at risk of being caught and penalized by search engines. Using black hat SEO tactics can result in your website being penalized (either algorithmically or manually), resulting in lower rankings and, most likely, a decrease in organic traffic.

Third, duplicate content can be used to flood the search engine with multiple copies of the same text in the hope that one of them will remain and have a high position for the target keywords. Black hat SEO is a set of SEO techniques used to increase a site's ranking on search engine results pages that violate search engine guidelines. Instead, you should use white hat SEO tactics such as creating incredible content, graphics, data, interviews, or any other content that allows you to acquire backlinks naturally over time. Black hat vendors provide inaccurate information in Structured Data to trick search engines and users about content and to manipulate rankings. Google wants to make sure it's able to return quality results to its users' search queries, and Black Hat's SEO practices can skew the results that are displayed. Black Hat SEO takes advantage of this by using link farms to inflate the number of backlinks a particular site has.

The same test can be applied to paid search practices to determine if an activity is considered black hat ppc. GScraper is a black hat SEO tool that pulls Google URLs based on the footprints and keywords you specify and then posts links to them. Black Hat SEO is also known as spamdexing because it uses spam methods to manipulate the algorithm. Along the same lines as cloaking, this could include redirecting a search engine crawler to one page and all other users to another page. Whether it's an old page that you're updating to a new URL or you're preparing to migrate a site, using redirects is a common part of SEO. When it comes to using black hat tactics, the truth is that these techniques don't help users, and they wouldn't be used if there were no search engines.

Black hat SEO violates Google's webmaster guidelines and can be very detrimental to the health of your website's long-term ranking if discovered. Black Hat SEO, simply put, is the direct manipulation of a web page so that search engines rank it higher.

Kendra Ursua
Kendra Ursua

Webaholic. Unapologetic social mediaholic. Incurable music fan. Hardcore twitter enthusiast. Evil beeraholic.