What Is Cloaking In Search Engine Spam
Cloaking is another sleight-of-hand SEO technique. For SEO purposes, cloaking a site is a method of delivering a page based on who is requesting the page. For example, if a web site is using cloak- ing, when a regular visitor comes to the site, that visitor will see one page. But when a search crawler comes to the site, it sees a much more relevant, better optimized site.
Search engines frown on cloaking, and if you’re caught using cloaking techniques, your site will be penalized or even delisted completely.
There is another reason that people use cloaking on their web sites. Instead of trying to trick search engines, some web-site owners use cloaking to protect the source code of their web site. Because it’s possible for anyone to choose Show Source or Display Source Code from their browser’s tool menu, it’s sometimes frustrating for organizations that want to keep their source code proprietary.
Instead of putting it out for the whole world to see, these companies use page cloaking. But this is not an advisable way to protect your code. Search engine crawlers don’t like cloaked sites and your site will be penalized if you choose to use cloaking for any reason.