What Is Cloaking In SEO And How Many Types Of It?
Every business owner wants their webpage or website to rank first on the Search Engine Results Page. Optimizing your website is essential to achieving high search engine rankings. SEO is a slow process. You won't see immediate results.
Black Hat Search Engine Optimization Techniques is a faster way to optimize your website. One technique that can help your website rank high in search engine results pages is black hat SEO cloaking.
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2. Different Types Of Cloaking
What is Cloaking in SEO?
Cloaking is an SEO technique where users receive content or information that is different from the content presented to search engine crawlers.
If a search engine detects cloaking, it will remove the website permanently from the search engine index. The website will be removed from search results also.
You Can Watch This Video For More Information about Cloaking:
Different Types Of Cloaking
1. IP-Based Cloaking
Each user who visits a website is assigned an IP address that is based on their internet service and location. This allows users to be redirected to their desired page by using a page that has high traffic volume and a good ranking in the SERPs.
You can use reverse DNS records to identify an IP address and then set up.htaccess for redirection. This is the preferred method for cloaking.
2. User-Agent Cloaking
A user agent is a program that performs on behalf of a user. An example is a web browser that acts as a user agent and fetches website information from an operating system.
When you type in a query, your browser sends a code back to the server. This code will be used to identify the user agent. Cloaked content is served to the crawler user-agent if it is found.
3. JavaScript Cloaking
This happens when JavaScript-enabled web browsers display one version of the content and users with JavaScript disabled a different version.
4. HTTP_REFERER Cloaking
This method checks the HTTP_REFERER header from the requester and serves a cloaked or uncloaked website based on it.
5. HTTP Accept-language header cloaking
This method checks the HTTP Accept Language header of the user. Based on the match result, a specific version is presented. Simply put, if the HTTP Allow-Language header of a search engine is present, then a cloaked version is presented.
How Do You Do Cloaking In SEO?
Hidden or Invisible text
This cloaking SEO technique adds keywords to existing content, and then it is overwritten so that it is invisible to actual users. Keyword stuffing is used to rank higher in search engines.
These additional words or content are added to the webpage in the same background color, which is invisible to humans but can be tracked by search engine bots.
Websites created in Flash
According to the SEO guidelines, flash websites are not recommended. However, many websites can be built using flash or flash for certain features.
These website developers don't rebuild websites in plain HTML. They only create rich web pages that are available to search engine crawlers. Online visitors can access the flash pages of the actual website.
Text to HTML ratio
To optimize websites, search engines recommend a high "TEXT-to-HTML ratio". Simply put, the website should contain more written content than HTML tags.
Websites that have less content or post short articles will have a lower text-to-html ratio. These websites are not designed for SEO. Instead, webmasters disguise the content to comply with the SEO guidelines.
Is Cloaking Good For SEO?
Cloaking is the act of creating cloak content to try and distort search engine rankings. According to SEO guidelines, It is not good for seo and is considered a Black-hat SEO technique. If you are still interested in black hat SEO then you can check out these black hat SEO tools.
Some search engines have temporarily banned websites that engage with cloaking to prevent them from being indexable.
Read:
What is link farming and how does it affect your website's SEO?
Final Thoughts
The algorithm of the search engine is constantly changing and cloaking may result in your website being permanently removed from the index. This technique should not be used by websites.