What is Cloaking?

Cloaking - a technique used in web technologies to present different content or URLs to human users and search engine crawlers. It is a black hat SEO practice that violates Google's guidelines and may result in penalization.

In other words, cloaking means showing one version of a webpage to search engines and another version to human visitors. This can be achieved through various methods such as IP cloaking, user-agent cloaking, JavaScript cloaking, and more.

The primary purpose of cloaking is to manipulate the search engine rankings by displaying optimized content to search engines while hiding irrelevant or spammy content from users. However, this deceptive practice undermines the trustworthiness of search results and damages the user experience.