Cloaking, Canonical and Hidden Text
Search engine always try to facilitate users. Therefore, its algorithms updates on the regular basis, recently “Broad Core” update is one of the examples for smart devices internet users. Google guides webmasters since its very first update “Big Daddy” about user-friendly web design, content and functionality, but unfortunately yet many of the so-called SEO experts trying to make fool Google by the illogical or unethical black hat techniques.
Cloaking Pages
I am discussing only website content problems here, I found a competitor's website with very big name and even having high rankings at top keywords on Google involved in using Cloaking pages, and I wondered how can they survive and how long would they sustain their top rankings?
This is a black hat technique using by some SEOs, they use these kinds of cloaking for showing two different faces of their website, one for user and another to search engine spider, what is the temporary benefit of it? You can show highly rich content for the user and second one having keywords with nonsense text copy are for web crawler. User cannot be reached by some reasons, but search engine bots could easily find and crawl them for indexing.
Canonical Content
Canonical web pages are duplicate pages of your website or content, you can use a link code in your website tag, copy:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.yourdomain.com" />
and paste into:
<head>
It tells spiders not to assume same pages for indexing.
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Hidden Text
We all know about the very first SEO black hat technique that is called hidden text or copy onto your website, it is one of the types of cloaking, where webmasters used same color for background and text to hide stuffed keywords to users. I am telling you these things because when SEO experts themselves don’t know about the hidden text and cloaking, how could they provide true SEO services to their clients? This is very important to be aware of it, that’s why I am trying to describe all the similar and possible ways of cloaking content. Maybe my own competitors would notice and change their strategy in the future ??
SEO Bad Technique
I can’t stop me for giving my one of the competitor’s examples, but I don’t like to disclose their name. They have a beautiful website and content, having six (6) slides on main page, five (5) of them are images and sixth (6) one is the rich text base content, but when you press the next button and waiting for the 1st slide repetition you found another (seventh (7) slide unexpectedly with keyword stuffed content, with bold, italic and anchor links on keywords. It says, “Oooh, clever you; you’ve found our secret (keywords) text, this copy is for the benefit of search engines” Got shocked? This is not just enough, even you find that text copy saying “hello” to search engine’s bots, “So hello Google, Bing, Yahoo et al. We are a (keyword) and (keyword) based in the (keyword)” and blaw blaw blaw.
A normal user couldn’t find this, but if he does, then maybe it would impressive for a visitor who doesn’t know much about the search engine behavior and assume this a very useful technique, and give them full marks for SEO services, but actually it is very harmful for any website.
Default page and Domain
There are two URLs of your home page, one is yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com/index.php or html, both URLs point the same page, you should redirect your default page to .ae, but some of so-called SEO experts having not only two faces of their main page, even having badly keywords stuffing on one of those pages to search engine crawler. Be aware of these types of SEO experts.
WWW and without WWW
Almost all hosting companies providing this service, you can find your website with www.yourdomain.com and youdomain.com without www by default, this is also canonical type, you should redirect one of the domains to other one, same solution for the http and https web domains.
For other same canonical pages, you can use the code mentioned above to let the spiders know about your actual pages. Contact our SEO experts for any question regarding hidden text or canonical pages.