In search engine optimization, there is the term “cloaking”, which is used to improve rankings. This lexicon entry shows how this works and what advantages it actually provides.
What is cloaking?
Cloaking is used for search engine optimization and can improve the ranking of the website in the search engine. The crawler is offered different content under the URL than the visitor. The aim is to offer the user attractive content that is free from excessive SEO criteria.
How does cloaking work?
The aim of cloaking is to prepare the page differently for visitors and search engines. The page for the visitor can have multimedia content, while the page for the search engine is completely free of this. The search engine can recognize text content better than images or videos, although progress is being made here too. The crawlers are getting better and better here, but are still far from “perfect”.
The result of this method is that the user can be provided with an almost perfect page, while the search engine is only shown the content that it can read. This also has an overall advantage for the loading time, which is an important metric in search engine optimization.
Is cloaking a black hat SEO method?
Cloaking is considered a black hat SEO method and is therefore not an option for ordinary website operators, who may also use it to finance their livelihood. Cloaking is like a kind of mask, the search engine is denied the actual content – but the search engines want the actual content.
It therefore completely contradicts the guidelines of the search engines and could possibly also be punished as a trademark and competition infringement. If Google discovers such a method, this usually leads to exclusion from the index, which can result in the domain being deleted altogether.
How can cloaking be implemented?
There are several ways to implement cloaking. However, it is always based on server systems, as the user must already be recognized as a user before the call is made.
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User agent cloaking: Visitors are presented with different versions of a website depending on their user agent (usually browser).
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IP cloaking: Visitors with a specific IP address block receive completely different content and are thus redirected before the “actual” page view.
How is cloaking recognized?
Cloaking can be recognized quite easily; for example, search engines also use common browser identifiers to pretend to be an ordinary user. If an optimized page is then suddenly displayed, it is penalized. User agent cloaking is therefore a method that can be detected within seconds.
IP cloaking, on the other hand, is more difficult to expose, but this possibility will also soon be reliably unmasked, as search engine tools are constantly being developed. Changing the IP is easier than ever and Google certainly already has an algorithm to detect this kind of thing.
