What is Cloaking in SEO? (For Beginners)
Cloaking in SEO is betraying the SEO spider or a human by showing it different content than the content or URLs displayed in a browser.
It is a textbook violation of?Google’s Webmaster guidelines?as it deceives users by showing them what they weren’t expecting to see.
It is a standard Black-hat practice that helps SEO Googlebot locate content that otherwise would have been omitted or ignored.
Video containers and Flash components are perfect hiding spots for cloaked content.
How do you know if a website is cloaking?
The cloaked content is delivered based on:
Text can be hidden in several ways:
Let’s talk about the cloaked content via IP address. Whenever a Googlebot requests a page, a server-side script runs and delivers a different version of the web page.
The content delivered to the SEO spider does not appear visually on the page. It is made to fool the SEO spider into believing it is there.
Another thing to keep in mind is that geolocation or mobile experience does not come under cloaking.
A french user will like their content to show up in french and a British user will like their content to show up in English.
Deliberately changing web pages to match the location of the user or the Googlebot does not come under cloaking as it isn’t misleading.
The major thing to keep in mind is that your website code does not contain anything that reacts to Googlebot and treats it differently.