Hate The Grind

There is a huge debate over what is black-hat SEO (frowned upon), versus white-hat SEO (accepted as genuine SEO) but there is no debate that cloaking is a black-hat SEO tactic.

Cloaking was a popular strategy when it came to SEO years ago, and still today many people use cloaking, in addition to other black hat SEO activities to improve their rankings on search results. What it involves is delivering a page that is custom designed to rank well just to search engine spiders while normal visitors to your website or blog see the regular version. This strategy is effective because the search engines think what they are seeing is the actual website they are spidering. These spider-friendly pages are keyword rich copies that may look very odd if a human visitor were to read it.

Now, if you ask me if cloaking should be used I would easily say no. For me, traffic from Google, and all the other Search Engines is vital to my success. If my websites were deindexed because of cloaking, I would lose a significant chunk of traffic. If you are asking yourself if you should implement cloaking, then ask yourself if you can risk being deindexed from the search engines. If it is a risk you can live with, then by all means employ this tactic because it does work. In fact, even Google uses cloaking! Of course, they are using a more basic form of cloaking by only cloaking the page titles.

What Sites Are Using Cloaking for SEO?
Today I came upon a tool (I am sure there are many more out there) that will let you simulate a search engine spider. You can choose to be a Google robot, or a Yahoo robot. More advanced websites will probably not be fooled by this website but the rudementary ones will probably be tricked into delivering a spider-friendly page to this bot-simulator.

Go check out your competitors to see if they are employing some black hat seo tricks like cloaking.

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