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What is Cloaking?

Cloaking is a technique banned by search engines (i.e. it should be avoided) that consists of generating different HTML content depending on whether it is intended for a visitor or for a search engine.

Indeed, it is possible to detect search engine robots through the presence of a specific User-Agent field in the HTTP requests that they send and show them a different content that includes extra key words that are not shown to visitors.

Nevertheless, if this technique is detected by a search engine (which is easy for them to do), the website runs the risk of no longer being indexed or even of being blacklisted (banished) for several months.
This document entitled « Webmastering - Referencing - Cloaking » from Kioskea (en.kioskea.net) is made available under the Creative Commons license. You can copy, modify copies of this page, under the conditions stipulated by the licence, as this note appears clearly.