The Risks and Rewards of Cloaking

Should you Cloak?

Reasons to cloak:

• If your pages have lots of Java, table, layers, and flash, providing the search engines with a plain HTML keyword focused will help them properly index your web page.
• Allows you to create more coherent text aimed at humans rather than repetitive keyword laden paragraphs optimized at search engine spiders.
• Prevents “Code Jackers” from stealing your HTML code.
• The smaller and less sophisticated search engines will pick up your site and may give you good positioning.

Reasons not to cloak:

• Search engines assume if you are cloaking your are misleading them. If someone reports your site to a specific search engine there is a small chance you could be banned from that search engine.
• Cloaking is against all major search engine’s terms of service.
• Since Google is such dominant search engine player. Many feel being banned from Google for cloaking is too much of a risk.
• Google uses page PR which is derived from the number of links to your site. So unless you have other high PR sites that you can link to the cloaked site, the most keyword intensive cloaked page in the world will not get you to the top of the search engine list in Google.
• Some consider cloaking to be an unethical search engine optimization technique.
• Unless the stars align properly for you, cloaking will not get you any extra traffic and most likely will get your site banned.