Cloaking

The term cloaking (translated into Spanish as “encubrimiento”) is a Black Hat SEO technique that basically consists of showing different content to website visitors and to search engine robots, in order to achieve better results in search rankings.

Cloaking violates the guidelines for proper use and quality that Google publishes for webmasters, as its rules specify that its indexing robot must always access the same content that users can see when visiting the website. Failure to comply with this rule, in an attempt to deceive search engine robots, penalizes SEO ranking.

1. How does cloaking work?

Before exploring how cloaking works, it’s important to understand the process search engine robots follow. When search engine robots access a site, they use the user-agent to avoid registering the visit as a real one (performed by a person), preventing any impact on the website’s metrics.

For this reason, some webmasters take advantage of this to serve a completely different page, with HTML optimized for the search engine robot, that has little or nothing to do with the page that ranks in the search engine (the one website visitors see).

2. Ways to implement cloaking

By definition, cloaking is any SEO ranking strategy that involves duplicating or concealing content. Although there are many ways to implement cloaking, and search engines have effective methods to detect them, here are some of the most common cloaking techniques for informational purposes:

– Hiding text: Text is placed in the same color as the page background, or one very similar to it, so that users can’t read it but the search robot can, since it reads the HTML version of the website.

– Redirects: For this form of cloaking, a different URL is ranked on the search results page, which sends the user directly to another page that has nothing to do with what the results page originally promised.

– Geolocation: In this case, depending on the visitor’s location (geolocation based on the IP), different pages would be shown to the search robot, in order to achieve more relevant SEO rankings in very specific regions. However, users ultimately see a generic page.

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