Today, more and more website operators employ cloaking to present content to a search engine that bears no relevance to the content displayed to site visitors. To illustrate how this attempted manipulation takes place, we’ll demonstrate with the example of a fictitious casino webpage.
In order to increase visibility on the World Wide Web, a provider of an online casino could decide to display targeted content containing free-to-play board games to search engine crawlers, even though visitors that land on the website can only take part in pay-to-play gambling games. As a result of this false information, the search engine lists the online casino in the index for free-to-play board games and recommends the casino site as a search result for keywords that don’t actually match its true content. This annoys misguided visitors and reduces the user friendliness of the search engine.
In order to prevent tricks like these, search engine operators crack down hard on cloaking techniques. Market leader Google has its own specialized web spam team to combat this black hat SEO tactic. Any website operators considering implementing cloaking methods have to be aware that their project(s) will be removed from the search index completely as punishment when they’re caught.