What the meaning of Cloaking Watch video here for explanation.
CloakingCloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user-agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.
Some examples of cloaking include:- Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users.
- Serving different content to search engines than to users.
If your site contains elements that aren't crawlable by search engines (such as rich media files other than Flash, JavaScript, or images), you shouldn't provide cloaked content to search engines. Rather, you should consider visitors to your site who are unable to view these elements as well. For instance:
- Provide alt text that describes images for visitors with screen readers or images turned off in their browsers.
- Provide the textual contents of JavaScript in a noscript tag.
Doorway pagesDoorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.
Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines.
Google's aim is to give our users the most valuable and relevant search results. Therefore, we frown on practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by directing them to sites other than the ones they selected, and that provide content solely for the benefit of search engines. Google may take action on doorway sites and other sites making use of these deceptive practice, including removing these sites from the Google index.
Sneaky JavaScript redirectsWhen Googlebot indexes a page containing JavaScript, it will index that page but it may not follow or index any links hidden in the JavaScript itself. Use of JavaScript is an entirely legitimate web practice. However, use of JavaScript with the intent to deceive search engines is not. For instance, placing different text in JavaScript than in a noscript tag violates our Webmaster Guidelines because it displays different content for users (who see the JavaScript-based text) than for search engines (which see the noscript-based text). Along those lines, it violates the Webmaster Guidelines to embed a link in JavaScript that redirects the user to a different page with the intent to show the user a different page than the search engine sees. When a redirect link is embedded in JavaScript, the search engine indexes the original page rather than following the link, whereas users are taken to the redirect target. Like cloaking, this practice is deceptive because it displays different content to users and to Googlebot, and can take a visitor somewhere other than where they intended to go.
Note that placement of links within JavaScript is alone not deceptive. When examining JavaScript on your site to ensure your site adheres to our guidelines, consider the intent.
Keep in mind that since search engines generally can't access the contents of JavaScript, legitimate links within JavaScript will likely be inaccessible to them (as well as to visitors without Javascript-enabled browsers). You might instead keep links outside of JavaScript or replicate them in a noscript tag.
