Cloaking in SEO – Types, Implementation, Penalties, & More

Business owners and online marketers are constantly aiming to get higher rankings for their websites. To accomplish this, they use search engine optimization techniques to increase the website’s visibility, ranking, and web traffic. These include keyword placement, on-page SEO, off-page optimization, and local SEO. However, to gain higher rankings on search engine result pages more quickly, a black-hat SEO tactic called cloaking is used. It involves deceiving search engine crawlers to quickly achieve top rankings on SERPs. Ideally, this technique should not be used, as it is unethical and can lead to penalties from search engines. Learn about cloaking in SEO in this blog and the various cloaking techniques used to deceive search engine crawlers.

What Is Cloaking in SEO?

Cloaking is an unethical SEO technique where a website displays one version of a web address, page, or content to search engines for ranking purposes and a different version for its visitors. The purpose of cloaking is to improve search engine optimization (SEO) by showing a version of the page to search engine bots that fulfill the criteria required to increase its ranking. In a nutshell, it manipulates search engine rankings. However, this practice is considered a black hat SEO technique and should be avoided. To learn about the best practices of SEO, you can enroll in an online digital marketing course to become an SEO specialist.

Types of Cloaking in SEO

There are various types of cloaking techniques in SEO, and each of them has its own way of implementation. They are as follows:

1. IP-based Cloaking

When a device or network is connected to the Internet, it is assigned a unique numerical identifier called an Internet Protocol (IP) address.

• An IP address is typically provided by an internet service provider.
• An ISP is necessary for online communication.
• IP-based cloaking is the most common cloaking method.
• In this type of cloaking, the user’s IP address is used to tailor the content shown to the web user.
• This is frequently done to provide visitors from various locations with different content.

2. User-Agent Cloaking

In this type of cloaking:

• The user-agent string gets manipulated. 
• The user-agent string is found in the HTTP headers and serves to identify devices that request online content.
• It informs the server about the visiting device, among other things.
• This data can be used to determine the content to provide.
• This type of cloaking in SEO involves directing different websites to different web browsers based on their user-agent strings. 
• The main purpose of doing this is to enhance the user experience on various browser types.

3. JavaScript Cloaking

This black-hat SEO cloaking method:

• Splits website visitors into two parties.
• The first are those that have JavaScript disabled, which are typically search engines. 
• They’ll be given a widely optimized website that is more geared towards ranking on the first page of Google.
• The second group is made up of those who have JavaScript enabled. 
• Regular website visitors who receive the user-friendly version of a website fall into this category.

4. HTTP_REFERER Cloaking

The HTTP Referrer header:

• Identifies the URL of the previous web page associated with the current web page or requested resource.
• This header allows websites and web servers to determine where web traffic is coming from.
• This type of cloaking technique examines the visitor’s HTTP_REFERER header. Depending on the visitor’s referrer, different content is displayed.
• It presents different landing pages from different sources to visitors.
• This means that if the visitor’s header is detected as coming from a search engine crawler, a fake page with optimized content is created.
• On the other hand, if a known search engine crawler does not detect the header, a user-oriented version of the website is displayed.

5. HTTP Accept-Language Header

The HTTP Accept-Language Header:

• Informs the server about the languages a web user can understand. 
• The HTTP Accept-Language proposal provides a list of supported languages and uses content negotiation to select one to include in the content-language header.
• The server detects the language based on the browser’s language, or the user modifies the language settings.
• If the user is familiar with a language not supported by the server, it returns a “406 Not Acceptable” status code. 
• This type of cloaking also examines the visitor’s HTTP Accept-Language Header before serving the cloaked content. 
• It presents different content based on the language preferences of the user. 
• An SEO-optimized website is displayed if the header is recognized as coming from a search engine. 
• If not from a known search engine, the user-optimized website (cloaked content) is displayed.

Explore the best digital marketing course with placement guarantee to excel in all the concepts of digital marketing.

Permitted Ways to Use Cloaking

While using cloaking in SEO is unethical, there are some accepted methods of doing so. They are as follows:

• Invisible or Hidden Text: This cloaking method involves including hidden SEO-optimized text in the same color as the website background. Technically, the text remains on the website without being visible to the user’s eyes. The hidden text is only visible to and read by search engine crawlers.
• HTML-Rich Websites: This type of website cloaking relies on the “text-to-HTML ratio”. A web page should have the highest “text-to-HTML ratio”. This means that there should be more text (content) than HTML tags. Rather than reaching the ideal text-to-HTML ratio of 25-70%, cloaking is used to fulfill technical SEO requirements.
• Flash-Based Websites: SEO guidelines oppose using flash-based websites. This is mainly done when the developer does not want to rebuild the website but rather rewrite everything in plain HTML. This cloaking method creates an HTML website page optimized for search engine crawlers. Following that, users of the website are shown more flash pages with user-friendly content. 
• Replacement of JavaScript: By replacing JavaScript with HTML, this method displays content that is hidden from search engines. It uses a script to identify the user’s IP address and then shows content determined by the user’s location or browser type. This is usually done to enhance the user experience while making the website search engine friendly.
• Image Gallery Website: Image gallery websites primarily consist of images, but search engine bots and crawlers often overlook them. To improve ranking, webmasters use keywords and content to camouflage image-heavy pages.

What Penalty Does Google Have for Cloaking?

All search engines penalize the practice of cloaking in SEO. Google will either blacklist or penalize the website for violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. The penalty includes:

• Removal from Google’s search engine result pages (SERPs) 
• Lower rankings for the website
• Loss of web traffic
• Less user engagement 
• Lower conversion rate 

Conclusion

Cloaking in SEO is a shortcut tactic for ranking the website higher. This means that while cloaking may help you rank higher in the short term, it will eventually become ineffective as search engine algorithms become better at detecting it. In the long-term, it is more beneficial to create high-quality and relevant content that is engaging to users and search engine crawlers to have a strong online presence.

FAQs