Cloaking: Undignified And Unethical way of Improving Search Engine Rankings

How would you feel when you go out to buy something in the market and the seller talks all good things about the product that you want to buy. But as soon as you buy that product and try to use it, you find many things that the seller didn't disclose to you purposely fearing that you may not buy the product. That's exactly what cloaking means. Its root word is cloak that means a clothing piece or robe to hide yourself. And that's what cloaking in SEO means. Google defines cloaking as "a website that returns altered webpages to search engines crawling the site." The intention behind cloaking is to return different pages to the users from that sent to the search engines. In other words, cloaking is like withholding information deliberately. The content is distorted and misleading for the users as what they hoped to find on the page differs from what they actually find. The major search engines consider this as highly unethical and take strict action against web sites indulging in cloaking. They may even ban the website using cloaking to earn higher search engine rankings. When a web site owner tries to show one version of a page to the user and another version to the search engines, he is indulging in deceptive marketing strategies. But this heinous practice being used just to get higher rankings in the search engines challenges the very accuracy of search results and algorithms. If search engines do not provide quality information to the users, the users will lose faith in them and wouldn't know where to find relevant information. The very purpose of the world wide web to provide worthwhile information would be rendered useless. When there are more ethical and better options for increasing the visitor traffic of your web site, why malign your name and hard work done till now to establish your brand entity by using short term and unethical strategies like cloaking. Refrain from it as it might earn you some more clicks, but that doesn't mean earning profits. You may rather damage your online reputation if the search engine bans you forever for cloaking.

http://www.segnant.com/