iSocialWeb

Cloaking SEO

What it is, what it is for and how it works

What is Cloaking SEO?

Cloaking SEO is a practice employed by some webmasters to display one version of a web page with different content to search engines and another to human users, with the goal of improving a website’s ranking in search engines.
This SEO technique involves developing two different versions of the same website:

  • One for users
  • and another for search engine spiders or crawlers.

Literally with this practice users and search engines are deceived.

Quite simply. Cloaking SEO is often used to mask fraudulent activities, hide sites with illegal content, paid sites to capture organic traffic, or simply hack devices.

Cloaking Example

If you do this search in google: doridori.es “sex”, the search engine returned these results until recently:

In conclusion

Important: if your website has been built differently to adapt to computers and mobile devices, this does not count as cloaking. Search engines take into account that two web versions can coexist for the same domain: the desktop version and the mobile version.