Summary: Cloaking is the practice of showing one thing to the search engines and another to your visitors. This is heavily frowned upon by Google. If you do want to use javascript and flash elements, there is an alternative, search engine friendly way to deal with these elements.
‘Cloaking’ means showing one set of content to the search engines and a different set of content to visitors. Why would you want to do this anyway? Well, you might for example want to just show people an offer the second they land on your page. But to get them there, you know you need great content that Google will regard as highly relevant to the product you’re trying to sell (bringing you the right kind of visitors, those that want to buy). So you might show Google some great optimised content but create a script (using php or javascript) that displays just your advert to a visitor. This is achieved by looking at the user agent. Good idea? No!
Google’s business is to deliver relevant, accurate results to its users and so it invests a huge amount of money into detecting website owners that are trying to cheat the system. Employing practices like cloaking can cause Google to view your site as deceptive and ultimately, remove it from its index.
Be very careful of website design companies who suggest that you can have a flash or javascript website but serve up a HTML version to the search engines. This will be considered cloaked content. You can instead provide the text contents of the javascript or flash in a noscript tag. You need to make sure that the content in the flash/javascript and the content in the noscript tag is substantially the same.
Enjoyed this article?
Subscribe to our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter or just simply recommend it.
Further Discussion
Leave a Response
Make sure you enter the * required information where indicated. Responses are moderated so please no link dropping, no keywords or domains as names; do not spam, and do not advertise!