What is Page Cloaking?

Page cloaking is a SEO technique used to deliver altered web pages under different circumstances. There are 2 main reasons why a website developer would use page cloaking: it enables them to hide the source code of the optimised page and thus prevent competitors from viewing or even copying this code. Secondly, it allows them to create one highly optimised page to serve up to a search engine and another that is aesthetically pleasing for a human. Moreover, the optimised pages meant for a search engine could contain a repetition of keywords and so would not be attractive to display to the human visitor.

However, search engines do not like this technique and view it as unethical or "black hat". Generally the websites which use such techniques will be discredited and will most likely be banned from their index. Page cloaking prevents the search engines from being able to spider the same pages as human visitors, so they are seeing a completely different page to that of a User. Therefore, search engines cannot be confident that they are delivering the most relevant results to their search Users, and so class this as a black hat SEO technique.

Here at SEO Junkies we do not use these techniques. All of our Search Engine Optimisation techniques are ethical and honest or "white hat". For more information on our SEO expertises can help your website please contact us.