SEO Avoid cloaking techniques

Cloaking, luckily for us, has been defined well by Google. The Google webmaster help pages explicitly defines cloaking for us...

"the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engine robots"

Let's see what Wikipedia says about cloaking... "Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine robot is different from that presented to the users' browser."

In plain language, cloaking is a technical ploy that people have used to deceive search engines. A new webmaster need not worry about it too much, because in order to be cloaking you pretty much know you are doing it. If do not know how to cloak, you probably are not doing it. If you do know what it is and you are doing it...

Cloaking is explicitly against the Google guidelines

It can get you removed from the Google index.

I recommend the video by Google employee Matt Cutts who provides a simple, easy to grasp definition of cloaking.

Examples of Cloaking

• Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a 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