Cloaking is a black hat SEO

Noyon123

Technique where a website shows one version of a URL, page, or piece of content to the search engines for ranking purposes while showing another to its actual visitors. When done purposefully, cloaking in SEO is a direct attempt to fool crawl bots and a serious violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines. Cloaking can also sometimes happen accidentally, so it’s important to understand what it entails, as well as why you should avoid it and what to do if you spot it. writeraccess-free-trial What are Some Cloaking Practices? Cloaking in SEO can take a variety of different forms, and all of them are considered to be against webmaster guidelines.

Here’s a closer look at some of the most common. Implementing Bahrain WhatsApp Number Hidden Text Some website owners get the clever idea to install invisible text on various pages in an attempt to manipulate search engines. The simplest way to do this is by making the foreground the same color as the background. However, some have been known to use JavaScript or CSS to disguise text, as well. User Agent Cloaking In user agent cloaking, a dedicated program — called a user agent — is used in place of a traditional user to evaluate web visitors and determine which version of a cloaked site should be presented.



This is accomplished via a piece of code sent directly to the server. When a visitor is identified as a crawl bot, it is shown specially prepared cloaked content. IP Cloaking This is perhaps the most common form of cloaking in SEO. It’s when a user is redirected to the desired site through a second site that already has a high Google ranking. This is done by setting up .Htaccess via reverse DNS records in order to smoothly redirect various web users. HTTP Accept-Language Cloaking In this cloaking technique, a check is performed on a user’s HTTP Accept-Language header in order to determine whether it’s a standard visitor or a web crawler.