Hi, Cloaking is a technique to show a different content to the bots and the user. Generally, the bots are given lots of keywords but they don't appear for the user... Google can detect it so that's a really bad thing to do, unless you want your site to be penalized... Johann
Cloaking can be used in other way....its redirects affiliate links so that google could not track them from your website.....it works....php cloaker is such website
Johann hit the nail on the head. Cloaking is an old spamming technique where you serve up different content based on the User-Agent requesting it. For example, if it's a search engine crawler, you serve up one version of the page, and if it's a user's browser, you serve up a different version of the page. And now that you know what it is, STAY AS FAR AWAY FROM IT AS POSSIBLE! Cloaking is a sure fire way to get severely penalized... if not completely delisted. One of the more high profile examples of this was BMW a few years ago. Cloaking detection is a borderline trivial problem now so it's almost a guarantee that you'll get caught.
There's also the trick of putting a "read more" link to stuff the page with keywords hoping the users won't too often click on it... I don't know if it's also considered as cloaking by the engines (could be, potentially), but it certainly is penalized as keyword stuffing.
Cloaking is basically when you show search engine bots one thing and humans another. Its generally regarded as Black Hat SEO technique and search engine don't like this. So it is harmful for our website.
Cloaking is a black hat seo technique to show different contents based on the user agent and ip. One should not follow it as Google easily detects it.
Cloaking is a blackhat technique. It's the process of making human and search engine fool. In this technique, search engine bots will index your one page but whenever viewers will open this page they'll show another or unnecessary material there. It's the technique to make click on your site.
It's a method of redirecting user to some different page. Say you have build a text based content but want your user to land on a flash based page. So if you automatically redirect your user from text based page to flash page so that user have different page than that of search engine then it is call cloaking.