Cloaking in SEO enables one to present different information or content to users and search engine crawler. However, cloaking is considered as a black hat technique and you should not even think about opting this illegal activity. A search engine can ban your website permanently if cloaking is found.
Google’s take on cloaking
Cloaking is regarded as the violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines as it provides different result to users from what they might have expected.
Cloaking is mainly enforced to improve search engine ranking by bewildering the robot. With a robust security structure, you must be thinking how cloaking is done? Well, here’s the explanation
How to implement Cloaking
As we know every internet device has been assigned a specific IP and content is delivered based on various IP addresses. By modifying .htaccess file you can implement cloaking in your website.
There are different types of cloaking
1. Hidden Text
Webmasters do keyword stuffing and content overwriting and make it invisible to users. Information is added in the same color as of the background so that user can’t find it .
2. Flash Based Websites
Flash is prohibited in SEO, still many websites are built-in flash. In order to save time, content-rich web pages are created for search engines and flash enable pages are offered to users.
3. HTML Rich Websites
A high text to HTML ratio is considered good in SEO. In simple words, your page should have more text as compared to HTML Tags. While writing short articles, Text to HTML ratio is always low. To meet SEO guidelines, webmasters often go for cloaking.
4. Replacement of Javascript
Utilizing JavaScript to demonstrate substance to non-JavaScript skilled guests that coordinates the literary data inside a Flash or other interactive media component.
Search engine giants oppose cloaking as it baffle their users and doesn’t go with standards. If you get caught doing cloaking, your may get penalized from indexing.
Hence it is suggested to not opt cloaking by opting shortcuts.
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