Tech Lover 9

If you show some content to search engine spiders and some entirely different content to your website/blog visitors, then it’s called Cloaking.

Cloaking is violation of Google’s TOS (Terms of Service). But, Cloaking is not necessarily a spammy activity all the time. If your intention is good towards your users as well as browsers, it is not considered as spammy.

That means you are serving something valuable to your users as well as showing something to search engine which is absolutely White Hat SEO. Even, the search engine giant Google also practice cloaking for its different products like Gmail, Google AdSense, Google AdWords etc. but with a good intention, adding value to its users.

We will discuss about the legitimate uses of Cloaking that are not deceptive to the search engines or spammy in nature, with the help of Cookies and Session IDs.

Cookie is a small text file that websites/blogs usually leave on the visitor’s hard drive, there by helping the website to track that person over a period of time.


Example: Gmail remembers your User ID and PW for subsequent visits due to the Cookies. Common uses of cookies are remembering User Id/PW, maintaining a shopping cart and keeping track of previously visited web-pages.


Session IDs are almost identical to cookies in functionality, but it expires when the browser shuts down. It is no longer stored on the user’s hard disc.

You can call Session ID, a temporary Cookie. But, it is possible to set an expiration date for Session IDs (years).

Legitimate uses of cloaking

1. Content requiring registration (Premium Content) or 1st Click FREE: If you offer some premium content (paid) to your users (registered), then you will like to show the regular page to the search engines and the premium pages to your registered users.

(We at MoneyCTL, practice this technique successfully without any problem)

2. Navigational issues for duplicate content: Have you seen, a single post on your WordPress blog with different tags and categories, has multiple URLs. Search engine considers this as duplicate content when indexes multiple URLs for a single post. To avoid this problem, you have to make your tag cloud, pagination index etc non-indexable.

3. Duplicate content issues: If you have a large blog/website with hundreds or thousands of pages, with internal duplication of articles or keywords, then you have to restrict the search engine bots to index duplicate pages by using the robots.txt file or 301 redirect (Permanent redirect).

4. Different content for different users: Sometimes webmasters want to show different content to different users from different geographies. Because different products are popular in different countries. In this case you have to show a default version of page to the search engines and other versions to users from different countries.

Cloaking and search engine penalties

Search engines penalize websites, if the intention is ill, while practicing cloaking. If you really respect your users as well as browsers, and show them different content, but with value and good intention, then you will never be penalized. Famous sites practicing cloaking successfully are Google, NYTimes.com and Amazon.com.