Cloaking

Cloaking describes the situation, where different content is displayed to search engines than to visitors:

• Visitors see a user-friendly, visually appealing website. This website can e.g. contain many images or multimedia elements and little text.

• Crawlers from search engines see another version of the website that was designed to trick them. This version of the website has nearly only text on it that was optimized for search engines.

Cloaking is prohibited by most search engines. When a search engine recognizes cloaking on a website, it will remove it permanently from its index and the website won’t be displayed in the search results anymore.

Tip!

In Hello Engines! Professional you can use the Web Robobt Simulator to compare how human visitors see the website and how crawlers see it.