Cloaking is a term used for deceptive programming where the content seen by search engines is different to the content seen by the Internet user.

It is done in order to achieve higher search engine rankings to the dismay of the Internet user who will find themselves on websites, which is irrelevant to their search. Search engine users may select a website from a result screen with a subject that matches their search but the content of the site being completely different, often of a pornographic or offensive nature.

How it works

Cloaking works by running side scripts to websites and delivering different sets of information to the search engine and user. The website presented to search engines is often in HTML format while the Internet user will receive a website with images or Flash. 

Cloaking may include the use of irrelevant information on the Meta keys of a website, causing a website with no relevance to a specific search to appear as a premium result. Cloaking techniques attempt to fool computer search engine spiders presenting them with false websites. How do they know which version of the website to show to whom?

They distinguish between search engines and users through determining how the user got to the page. Most search engines will access the page through a directory page and will then receive the fake page whereas users mostly access the page through a search engine and will receive the deceptive page.

As most visitors to these websites find them through search engines and do not try to access them directly this is an effective way of deceiving the programs that search engines deploy to detect cloaking.

To cloak or not to cloak

Internet users usually find sites through a search engine, even if they know exactly which company they are looking for they are still likely to search for the website address. Internet users do not scroll very far down in these searches and may only visit the first few results; it is therefore becoming very important for website developers to achieve high rankings.

Higher rankings are directly translated into higher traffic and therefore higher sales. With cloaking this is however not the case as visitors that has been mislead into visiting the site will quickly see that it is a false lead and that the site does not offer what they searched for and will leave the website without committing to any sales.

SEO service providers can often fool customers by providing large traffic statistics to customers by using questionable practices like cloaking. Website owners are urged to look at conversion figures (how many visitors committed to sales) as opposed to traffic volumes as these might be misleading.

The alternatives

Google have very clear guidelines when it comes to cloaking and recommend that websites provide alt text, describing images for visitors with screen readers or images turned off in their browsers. They also recommend that websites provide the textual contents of JavaScript in a noscript tag, using the same text and not making major changes.

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