Cloaking
What is Cloaking?
Cloaking is a technique where users see different content on their page or any piece of content. It is considered a black hat SEO technique because it can potentially manipulate a website’s search engine rankings. Some of the cloaking practices include:-
- Implementing hidden texts so that texts can be disguised using JavaScript, or CSS.
- User agent identifies the users as either regular or bot. If it’s a bot, cloaked content is shown.
- HTTP Accept-Language Cloaking checks the visitor’s language settings to determine whether the visitor is a web crawler. If yes, cloaked content is displayed.
- IP Cloaking is another practice where users are redirected to the second site with high rankings. It is done by using .htaccess and reverse DNS records.
Like the other black hat SEO techniques, cloaking the content is under the eyes of Google, which can result in penalisation, and you may not even get the chance to implement changes after getting penalised. The website’s ranking can go down, ban the site, and can damage the brand’s reputation.