Cloaking is a growing problem for search engines. ‘Cloaking’ essentially cloaks a page of secondary content and presents a crawler or search engine spider like Googlebot with an entirely different page of content. It started out in the early days of the internet when black hat SEO’s would create two unique pages in order to mask more suspect content on one of the pages. This would fool the crawlers into thinking that there was a standard page while web users see another altogether.

Back in the early days of the internet, when Babelfish was the translator du jour and people built .gif heavy websites with obscene backgrounds on Angelfire, this cloaking method was used to disguise porn and other assorted dodgy content from the search engine spiders. To paraphrase Matt Cutts, ‘Google-Bot would see Disney characters and the user would see porn.’ All very underhanded really and Google sees this as a violation of its quality guidelines. No matter what.

Google’s Matt Cutts’ video on cloaking and Google.

This is a great video straight from the proverbial horse’s mouth. Cutts gives a clear explanation of the devious nature of cloaking. His videos are becoming enormously popular for web developers and search engine marketers. He’s helping to dispel a lot of the myths and hearsay of search engine marketing and the great thing is that he heads the Google web spam team. Really, there aren’t many sources with that level of credibility or access to information on exactly what Google looks for.

What to look out for:

In Google’s Webmaster Tools the ‘Fetch as Google Bot’ function is a good way of looking at your web pages as Googlebot would. Doing this gives you a clear picture of what the Bot would see and gives you the chance to measure whether your pages are safe within Google’s quality guidelines. If they aren’t, the pages need to be re-addressed or Google will treat these as problem pages. The web spam teams will then intervene to tackle the pages as a priority. This could potentially be harmful for your website and its SEO.

Multi-language 

There are options if you need to display different content for different languages or countries. One way to do this is to use geo-location. Geo-location allows you to identify users from other countries and alter the content to match the language spoken in the country based on their needs.

Search engine marketing can be a difficult game to play at times because there are so many dodgy measures out there. The industry is dominated by people employing underhanded measures in order to achieve search goals and cloaking is a real issue. If your web developer – or you – are using cloaking to mask content from the search engine spiders, it could seriously jeopardise your current standing in the search engine rankings. Google is getting better at identifying these and they are working hard to put a resolute and final end to these practices.

Don’t be like the Klingons. Cloaking is cowardly.

Paul