Mr Google says cloaking is really bad

[Ducksauce]

In this Youtube vid, "Mr Google" at 40 seconds refers to "Cloaking" as really bad and will get a penalty, is he referring to cloaking a URL, like an affiliate link you want to hide?

YouTube - When are penalties lifted?

[SuResearcher]

When Google talks about cloaking here is what they mean:

From Wikipedia:
"Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed."

What you are talking about is using a redirecting link. The terms cloaking and redirection are used interchangeably and really shouldn't be.

[GeorgR.]

Cloaking means to show something else to Google than what a normal human visitor sees. (= trying to trick search engines)

If you hide/conceal your affiliate link this is not really cloaking, although people often use the same word for this.

[yukon]

Lol, If you click the video above & follow it to Youtube, here is one of the comments.

You should list all the offending sites in a searchable penalty box. Like Google jail.

[thebitbotdotcom]

Cloaking is bad. It is showing Google one thing and people something else...not cool.

[yukon]

What is it that's not cool?

Do you email Google & tell them about all the backlinks you spam, in order to game the SERPs?

Originally Posted by thebitbotdotcom

Cloaking is bad. It is showing Google one thing and people something else...not cool.

[eshapard]

Originally Posted by SuResearcher

When Google talks about cloaking here is what they mean:

From Wikipedia:
"Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed."

What you are talking about is using a redirecting link. The terms cloaking and redirection are used interchangeably and really shouldn't be.

Yes, this video is about showing regular people one page, but google bot a different page.

It's even possible to show google bot hundreds or thousands of pages that are made artificially to have high LSI keyword density. These pages would have text that follows grammatical rules, so google would not be able to tell that they are fake, but a real person would instantly see them as garbage.

Then you could redirect real viewers to whatever pages you want.

It's a risky game because googlebots masquerade as regular browsers to check if you are doing this. So you would need a sure-fire way of identifying when a google bot is requesting pages from your site.

[pianochris]

I agree win google. Cloaking is bad and shouldn't be practised. People won't go to your site or you could get a bad name for yourself.lus I deem it unfair. My two cents that's all.