Since the web positioning system has existed as it is currently conceived, many have tried to circumvent it. Thus, historically, countless Black Hat SEO techniques have emerged , seeking to be a shortcut to appearing in Google’s SERPs. Cloaking was one of them . One of the most notorious!
Due to its lack of efficiency these days and the hard work of Google crawlers, many have forgotten about this type of practice. And you? Do you know what cloaking is ? Probably not! So, we’ll tell you about it below.
Cloaking is a technique that involves showing different versions of a page to users and Google crawlers. This is how bots stumbled upon pages whose content was of no value to users and still managed to appear in the SERPs.
As a result, low-quality URLs began to invade Google’s results pages, affecting the user experience.
That’s why cloaking and SEO are two terms doomed to be at odds. It’s impossible to achieve visibility by trying to fool both users and Google!
How to avoid cloaking ?
Many people ask this question: How do you avoid cloaking ? And the answer is very simple: You just need to find SEO techniques that truly help you increase your visibility without violating Google’s rules.
And if you need even more reasons to avoid cloaking altogether , we’ve got them! Read the following points carefully:
- Google has specialized its algorithms to such an extent that cloaking is 100% detectable. So believe us when we say it’s an almost guaranteed penalty.
- When Google began targeting these types of techniques, a number of new methods emerged to cover them up. None of them are still in use because crawlers now execute JavaScript code. There’s no escape!
- In its heyday, cloaking was based on the premise of ranking for high-authority keywords . However, Google has now come to place greater importance on natural and original content. It’s not worth putting your website’s reputation at risk!
Now you know everything about cloaking , so we hope you’ll avoid this technique penalized by Google at all costs. Instead, take a much more ethical route and try to optimize your website by applying methodologies accepted by Google, such as generating valuable content.
