Cloaking Checker
There are many varying black hat techniques out there in the world of SEO, united by the sole purpose of trying to deceive both search engines and users alike. One of the trickiest to detect is called ‘cloaking’.
Cloaking is a technique where a website will redirect a search engine spider to a side script when a search engine comes to index a website. This will then present the spider with something to crawl that isn’t on the website itself and human users can’t see, effectively showing one thing to search engines and something else entirely to users. Often the reason for this is that the site wants to attract searchers for something that they don’t actually offer, but wish to try and convince search engines that they do.
It’s a way for webmasters to split search engine spiders and searchers themselves into entirely separate groups. Their intention is to manipulate spiders into ranking their websites highly through the script whilst presenting searchers with something entirely different. A website of typically poor quality that wouldn’t achieve rankings of any significance if it was left to its own devices is often the culprit for cloaking.
The free cloaking checker offered by Searchengineoptimisation.co.uk can help to unearth websites that employ cloaking techniques to mislead. By typing the address of a website into the above search field our free cloaking checker will let you know if a website is legitimate or whether it’s trying to trick search engines with deceptive coding.
Cloaking is part of the ‘doorway page’ family of black hat techniques and is mainly used by people with little in the way of useful content to offer or those with X-rated material on their websites. By entering a domain into our free cloaking checker you can see whether the authority a website appears to have is genuine, or whether the webmaster has only built it up through unethical means.