Why Should You Avoid Cloaking in SEO?
What is Cloaking?
Cloaking is an SEO technique in which users are offered content or information that differs from that offered to search engine crawlers.
Cloaking is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides human visitors with different results.
A website must provide content to search engine spiders or bots (the google search crawler), in order to improve its search engine rankings for specific keywords.
Under cloaking, the website server is specifically programmed to offer a different version of marketing content to search engines as compared to what it offers to its regular users.
Why Should You Avoid Cloaking in SEO?
You could be penalized
Whether or not you’ve engaged in it knowingly, any type of black hat SEO, cloaking included, can get your marketing website heavily penalized by Google.
Once that happens,your search engine rankings take a serious dive, meaning all the hard work you’ve put into your site could be gone in an instant.
And once a site incurs Google penalties, it’s extremely hard to recover.
Your site could be banned
In some cases where a site is caught cloaking, Google decides to do more than simply slap a penalty on it. It could be banned entirely and indefinitely.
This is what’s known as a manual penalty, and it’s even harder to come back from than an algorithmic penalty.
A site that’s been entirely scrubbed from Google’s indexing system might as well not exist, as no one will be able to find it using keywords and key phrases anymore.
You’ll almost certainly get caught
Google and the rest of the search engines are getting smarter and increasingly efficient at spotting cloaking in SEO, as well as other black hat techniques.
Tricks a skilled SEO pro might have been able to get away with years ago are easily spotted this year. And this will only become more the case over time.
In other words, it’s really only a matter of time before you get caught.
It can damage your brand
Keep in mind that a practice that doesn’t properly serve search engine users really doesn’t serve your company, either.
People don’t like to be tricked. And if your audience figures out that’s something they can expect from you, they’ll likely leave and never come back.
Your customers will lose their sense of audience trust. And that’s the very opposite of what you want with brand building.
What are some Cloaking Practices?
Hidden Text
You can achieve hidden text in a few different ways. Matching foreground color and background color is a method used to hide text within a web page and is considered keyword stuffing.
Although this may happen by accident, Google punishes it in the same way.
Having an Unbalanced Text to HTML Ratio
Webmasters usually use this tactic when a digital web page is thin on content.
Web pages should have a high text to HTML ratio. However, some web pages increase the HTML ratio instead of developing and expanding upon their content.
Showing HTML to Search Engines, but Flash to Users
This is a form of ‘Agent Name Delivery’ and involves writing a website in HTML. These digital pages appear content-rich to crawlers but present as Flash to users.