Cloaking – How to Easily Damage your Virtual Reputation
November 28th, 2008 by Nick
For the reader, if not already understood, cloaking is considered bad or unethical when its intent is to deliberately mislead Search Engine Robots, or spiders, by showing them content entirely different to what humans see, then trying to cover their tracks by making it difficult to examine the version meant only for these spiders.
What is Cloaking
Simply, to achieve higher rankings through deception! However at times, Cloaking can be considered just unselfish and not unethical. For instance, when it is used by search engine ‘optimisers’ as a means to show pages that are optimised for different search engines which results in site owners fighting for rankings with the same keywords.
It becomes unethical only when the topic of alternative pages stray from the page which the visitor sees. There is a fine line between optimising a page for search engines, and misleading a search engine.
What does it Achieve?
It works like this, when someone reads the content on a site and they see something different to what the search engine spiders see. What cloaking tries to achieve is to improve the rankings of a site by messing with the Search Engines Algorithms and programming and trying to tricking it into giving a site a higher ranking.
Cloaking can also be used to trick search engines into visiting a site based on a search engine description which then turns out to have a substantially different content, for example, when one searches using specific keywords, they land on a site that has no relevance. Pornographic sites are most at fault for this, but cloaking is also being done by very reputable companies.
Another extreme form of cloaking could be Page jacking. This is one of the most unethical, controversial and most difficult to spot forms of cloaking. How this happens is when a site takes the source code of a page which is performing well in the search engine and then cloaks it behind their own. If someone can pull this off, the spider will see the optimised page and then make a decision whether to improve the rankings of the hi-jacked site, or remove the original, bona fide, site from the search engines index.
Consequences
Google revised their cloaking policy in 2006 which reads. “Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
Google also published this warning, “However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in removal from our index”.
Once your website gets a reputation amongst search engines for cloaking, it is difficult to hide from the effects which range from a damaged reputation, to lowering or resetting a hard earned PageRank. In extreme cases, the search engine can, and will remove the site from their database
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Cloaking is very unethical and hateful for the search engines. If you are cloaking purposely for internet marketing, it is not good for you. Cloaking the door way page/ get way page are the same in nature. In this the search engine reads something and when users click on that anchor text, it opens something different.
In the cases of pornography, cloaking may be helpful but not in the case of selling products and in informative related contents and services. Due to cloaking, these sites won’t work at all. This is totally cheating both the search engine and users/ visitor as of there is no relevancy at all.
Thanks for the post and for the site in general – a very interesting read.
I am curious, though – say I wish to build a site in Flash for whatever reasons. If I use the noscript tag to summarise any text content from the flash element, would that be considered cloaking?