What Is Cloaking in SEO

What is cloaking

Cloaking is one of the SEO methods, when the search bot and the user see different content on the same page. It is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides users with different results than they expected. If your site uses technologies that search engines have difficulty accessing, like JavaScript, images, or Flash, see Google recommendations for making that content accessible to search engines and users without cloaking.

Cloaking can be as a part of black hat SEO such a white hat method. A few examples when cloaking is a good decision.

• Protect contents from theft. The code that the owner protects against copying is not visible to users.
• Redirect users to specific language version of the website depends on their IP address.

How cloaking checker works

We crawl the page (via Googlebot and Yandexbot) two times and compare two versions of the page. If their content differs, our tool marks it as cloaking.