There are many different reasons for using cloaking on a website. These include:
- Hiding page content to stop theives stealing content.
- Serving pages based on geographical location.
- Showing different content to search engines. (BLACK HAT SEO)
Cloaking is known by a variety of different names but is mainly used by Black Hat SEO’s to serve optimised content for search engines so that websites rank naturally higher than they would otherwise. A good example of this would be a website written in flash that serves a HTML page stuffed with keywords to Google, MSN or Yahoo’s spiders so that the page actually shows text based on the flash movie.
Cloaking is looked down on by search engines and if caught can cause a website to be ejected from the index.
I have never used cloaking in any large sense however in some cases it can be worth using, not for serving alternate content for search engines but for displaying different language websites to users based on their geographical location.
For more information about cloaking please click HERE.
Google
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