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What exactly is considered cloaking?

by stoyansan
7 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I opened an eCommerce website and I am trying to add some text to the home page so I can make it more SEO friendly. The home page is already pretty much set up with a lot of images, and adding text will mess up the appearance of the whole site. I asked my developer to include a text in the H1 tag, but to do it in such a way that it is not visible to the public, so it does not mess up the appearance of the website.

Is that considered cloaking and am I in danger of being penalized by google and other search engines?

Here is a copy of the text

<div id="Athletic shoes and sneakers for men, women and kids">
<i>Authentic athletic shoes online from brands such as DSQUARED2, ZEMGEAR, Zoot,Brooks, Columbia, Chaco, Pearl iZUMi, Converse, Clarks, nike, adidas, originals and more</i></div>
#cloaking #considered
  • Profile picture of the author ddshosting
    Google's quality guidelines can be found here: Webmaster Guidelines - Webmaster Tools Help Have a good read and I also recommend reading Matt Cutt's blog Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO. Hope that helps
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  • Profile picture of the author CyborgX
    Cloaking is a practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines.Serving up different results based on user-agent may cause a site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index. It is often used as a spamdexing technique, to try to trick search engines into giving the relevant site a higher ranking
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  • Profile picture of the author andishm
    Cloaking is where you want to show redirection or any other content to website visitor however to search engine bot IP you want to show a highly SEO content page.
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  • Profile picture of the author Leo Wadsworth
    Yes, what you are doing appears to be cloaking, and puts you at significant risk.

    What is NOT cloaking would be to style the h1 tag so that you could show it to the public, but still indicate to Google that this is important. It can even be a local style, such as
    <h1 style="font-size:13px; font-weight:bold;"> or something like that.

    Bottom line - show the same text to Google as to humans.
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  • Profile picture of the author dhoottraining
    Clocking is the black hat SEO technique in which you can present the content to the Google spider is totally different than the content which you present to the browsers of the users.
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  • Profile picture of the author krishdir
    It is search engine optimization technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser.It is a form of doorway page technique...
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  • Profile picture of the author rajnish
    Thanks for all members I am also looking for answer of Clocking.So thanks for giving the nice explanation.
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