What is cloaking and why is it harmful?
The main task of any website is to present information in a friendly form and encourage the user to interact. Here the main role is played by content, which should be light and easy to read. Combined with skillful optimization, they are a ready recipe for attracting new users. Unfortunately, not everyone has the patience and willingness to act in this way, which results in ideas to take shortcuts known as cloaking.
What is SEO cloaking?
Content optimization is a fundamental SEO activity that yields positive results. Properly developing content and including keywords is essential in building website visibility, which translates into organic traffic gained. Although it may seem like a laborious and difficult process, it is worth the time spent on it. Cloaking involves presenting different page content to robots than to users. It is implemented in a variety of ways, but the most common is to add content on the page in the same color as the section background. As a result, such content is not visible to the user, but only to Google robots and other crawlers. This is usually a string of keywords that are forcefully stuffed into one section.
Example of cloaking occurring
Declining positions in Google and Ban
Black Hat SEO is a collection of prohibited SEO techniques. Among them is cloaking, which is an attempt to deceive search engines and get users to low-quality or completely different sites. SEO cloaking is unacceptable by search engines and results in a penalty. It is always a drop in Google rankings or removal of the entire website from the index, which is the consequence of receiving a ban from Google. This is because cloaking is a prohibited activity that is harmful and negatively affects the quality of search results. That’s why Google efficiently detects such irregularities and automatically slaps a penalty on sites that prefer to take shortcuts, instead of betting on quality content prepared for users, not search engines.
