Cloaking

Cloaking is one of the “black” methods of SEO optimization of sites, in which two different versions of web pages are created for a site: one for visitors and the other for search engines.

To carry out such a forgery, a webmaster needs to know the identification data of search robots: User Agent, IP address, or both. Appropriate settings allow you to automatically direct robots to a specially created web page optimized for relevant search queries.

At the same time, regular visitors, following the same queries, end up on a different version of the web page with irrelevant advertising content. Thus, cloaking is essentially a forgery of web pages and therefore belongs to the methods of “black” SEO.

Search engines are actively fighting cloaking and equate such sites with spam, removing them from their databases. Search engines can detect the presence of cloaking by changing the parameters of their robots, which is why the settings set by the webmaster do not work and the robot is sent to the irrelevant version of the page. Regular users also have the opportunity to expose this fraud, for example, by opening the site through a special feature in the Google Search Console, an Internet browser widget (Firefox User Agent Switcher) or special online services.

Today, the Cloaking method is considered an ineffective and irrelevant method of search engine optimization of sites.

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