What is considered to be cloaking in SEO?
Cloaking is one of the SEO methods, where the search engine and the user see different content on the same page. It is considered a violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines because it gives users different results than they expected. If your site uses technologies that search engines have difficulty accessing, such as JavaScript, images, or Flash, see Google recommendations to make that content accessible to search engines and users without hiding certain parts of the content.
Cloaking in SEO is considered to be black cat and white cat, depending on how it is adapted. Below are some examples where "cloaking" is considered acceptable:
- Protect your content from theft. The code that the site owner uses to protect against theft or to protect against content copying is not visible to users.
- Redirect users to a different language version of the website based on their IP address.
How does the anti-cloaking check work?
To check if a website uses this technique, it is necessary to go through certain steps.
First, the web page must be indexed by different search engines (Googlebot and Yandexbot) twice. The two versions of the page should then be compared. If their content differs, the verification tool will mark the page as using the black SEO technique, called cloaking. You can check such pages at the following address: https://sitechecker.pro/cloaking-checker/
Source: Sitechecker