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.
Why Cloaking is not recommended
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Cloaking consists of showing search engines content different from what real users see, with the aim of manipulating rankings. It violates Google’s guidelines and is considered Black Hat SEO.
Because it breaks the consistency between what is crawled and what is shown to the user, harming search results quality. Cloaking penalties can range from sharp drops to full deindexing.
Compare how the page is rendered to a normal user agent vs Googlebot using tools like Search Console’s “Inspect URL”, user-agent emulators or SEO crawlers that allow simulating different bots.