What is cloaking in SEO?

[JD]

Clocking is a considered as a black hat (spamdexing) technique in SEO. Can anyone provide more detailed information on it?

[pravinD]

Cloaking is a technique used in SEO, where your content is presented to the search engine spider in a different form. Whereas it is presented to the user's browser in different form. User's IP addresses or User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page are some of delivering bases to it.

[Joe]

The main task of cloaking is to take user to other site, by disguising the true content. During this process, the search engine spider & the browser are given different content for same web page.
Normally, cloaking is considered as black hat technique in SEO(Search Engine Optimization) industry.

[Gandhar Kulkarni]

Cloaking is the black hat SEO technique in which two types of content is offered, one is to the users and other is to the search engine. To be more specific, 1st one is for users means visitors who actually visit the website and second one would be for the search engines robots, the page which is specially for robots with full of links into it.

The common Cloaking practices includes,

1. Invisible or Hidden text.

2. Flash based website.

[shwetasaindane]

Cloaking or keywords stuffing, another black hat SEO strategy to fool crawlers and rank high. It is considered as a violation of Google Webmaster guidelines as in most search cases it serves users with the irrelevant result. Showing completely different content or URL to the search engine spider than to the user.
There are some common cloaking practices such as: Invisible or Hidden text, Flash Based Websites, Cloaking in E-Mail, HTML Rich Websites, Image Gallery Websites, Geo – Location
So just stay away from cloaking! as your website might get permanently ban or penalized if you're caught doing it

[DipakS]

Hello Everyone,

   Cloaking is the black hat SEO technique. It is a technique used to deliver the content on a Web page to a search engine in such a way that different content than what is delivered to a user appears on the search engine. The goal of cloaking is to boost a website's search engine ranking in Search Engine.

[Lokesh]

Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content showing to the search engine spider is different from that showing to the user's browser. Cloaking is a form of the black hat or doorway page technique. Cloaking is often used as a spamdexing technique to try to trick search engines into giving the relevant site a higher ranking.

Some examples of cloaking include:
- Submitting a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing another page of images or Flash to users.
- Inserting text or keywords into a page only when the User-agent requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor.