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.

Why do people use Cloaking?

The main reason why people use cloaking is for gaining higher visibility on search engine pages. By creating two versions of their website with distinct optimization strategies for each (one targeting a specific keyword), websites hope they will be prioritized over those that don't use it as well as attract backlinks from these sites since they contain richer material than the surface level page visible to most users. 

However, this approach violates ethical standards within industry protocols regarding internet transparency policies. In addition, studies show little positive impact on ranking due before noted deindexing from major Google algorithm changes based around detection technology advancements designed specifically for rooting out these types of activities.

Cloak Types

Cloak types, include Black Hat SEO practices making them illegal:

• User Agent Cloak: This type modifies what information is sent via HTTP headers within browser requests made by visitors or automated bots.
• IP Cloak: When marketers want to specifically hide from or show one type of user, they use this. Users and search engines will receive different content depending on the IP address that a request came from.

Cloaking is a highly controversial technique within the SEO industry. While it may provide short-term benefits in some cases, its impact is limited by constant algorithm updates & sets your website up for failure long term because of Google's negative stance towards these activities. 

In conclusion, cloaking, an unethical SEO practice, can harm websites over time with backslashes from major search engine providers like Google penalizing sites that use it. Instead of following black hat techniques such as these that place your website's online reputation at risk, we strongly encourage you to consider sustainable white-hat tactics when navigating the web development sphere.