What is cloaking?
Search engine cloaking is a process where you attract traffic by cheating the search
engines. You have two pages to display – one for the search engine and one that you
show to the surfer; one page is hidden in the other – hence the term ‘cloaking’.
Since the ‘cloaked’ page is highly keyword optimized, if it goes undetected by
the search engine, it would help in capturing a very high ranking for the website.
Why you should avoid cloaking?
Cloaking, if you look at it, is a shortcut method to get a higher ranking. As every
dirty SEO tactic, if it succeeds to dodge the tests of the search engine, it would
benefit the website greatly. However, this is rare. The search engines today,
like Google, are well equipped to identify cloaking efforts and when found out,
the search engine usually blacklists the website.
The risk is too much when compared to the benefit. Moreover, when there are so many other
ways to optimize your website. It is a very bad idea to use such dirty tricks and tactics
that may jeopardize your website investment.
When it was first initiated, it was a good idea, however, today – no matter how well
it is disguised, the search engines will catch and penalize the offenders.
If your website is blacklisted by any of the major search engines, your business website
will disappear from the Net for the simple reason that it will not reach the result pages
anymore.
Even if you are a large and well established website, you cannot afford to be blacklisted
by a major search engine. If you are new, this is pure suicide.
Author: Serge Daudelin
Previous news: 31 March 2007
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