Cloaking

Actually, every visitor to a site sees the same content on the web as the search engine reads. However, with the technique of cloaking, the web crawler or Google bot is presented with different content on a website, since the search engine prefers text content. This favoring of pages with unique text content is based on the assumption that good content is especially user-friendly. Consequently, many website operators strive for good content as part of search engine optimization. However, website visitors do not always want to read long texts when they visit a page and want to find information. Internet users increasingly enjoy consuming multimedia content such as videos or images. Technologies like Flash allow web pages to be equipped with great effects, animations, and sounds to provide the user with an interactive experience. However, these Flash pages lack the most relevant elements for web crawlers: Content, keywords, and links. Professional search engine optimization can therefore only be partially realized with a Flash page.

Cloaking sounds too good to please Google

Cloaking provides search engine crawlers and bots with text-heavy pages that they can easily index and rank, while web visitors can simultaneously be impressed with creative content. Sounds like an ideal solution, if cloaking were not excluded as a measure for SEO according to Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Cloaking is generally associated with spam methods of search engine optimization and usually with so-called Black Hat SEO. According to the search engine, the method is prohibited because it was frequently used for deception in the early days of SEO. For example, instead of presenting a topic differently through texts and videos, completely different content was displayed depending on the user, and two versions of a page were put online that were entirely different—such as children's toys and bicycles. Therefore, such web activities were often about deceiving the search engine. Reputable online marketing looks different.

Countermeasures by search engines

Search engines like Google generally try to prevent such Black Hat SEO methods, among other things, by using several unknown web crawlers across the Internet. Such crawlers visit the website via a neutral IP address and therefore cannot be excluded through so-called user-agent cloaking or IP cloaking. The result: the crawler detects whether illegal SEO measures have been applied or not. If such methods are detected on a website by the search engine, a ranking loss or even deindexing (the site is completely removed from the index) is usually expected. Typically, the operator then only has the option of building a new website, especially since the old one often ends up on a kind of "blacklist" at Google. For professional search engine optimization, such Black Hat SEO is therefore not recommended.

As confirmed by the former head of Google's web spam team, Matt Cutts, it was decided to exclude all forms of cloaking from the quality guidelines for search engine optimization. There is no good cloaking, as Google believes the web crawler should always be treated like a visitor and see the same version of a website as the user. Although the dynamics of websites (e.g., changes in content or ads) make it challenging for users and crawlers to see the same page, search engines are indeed quite lenient here – a loss in ranking is not immediately expected under these conditions.