360Presence

Cloaking isn’t a single technique; it’s an umbrella term for several methods used to serve different content. Understanding these helps recognise potential issues. Here are the common types of cloaking:

At its core, cloaking is the practice of showing one version of a webpage’s content to search engine crawlers (like Googlebot) and a completely different version to human visitors. Think of it as a digital disguise. The website serves different content based on whether the request is coming from a search engine bot or a real person using a browser. Why would anyone do this? The main goal is usually to manipulate search engine rankings. By showing bots keyword-rich, highly optimized content that might not be user-friendly or even relevant, site owners hope to trick the search engine into ranking their page higher for those keywords.