As the same URL(web address) showing one page to a search engine spider and a different page to a human visitor.
Cloaking is a black hat seo technique. In this, search engine's behavior and user's behavior both are different means search engine's crawler will crawl different web address and user will see different web address for the same site.
Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to that presented to the user's browser.Cloaking always create confusion for user. This tactic is not user-friendly. So please avoid it.
There is currently two different meanings for cloaking; the first seo joy and bellsimth already pointed out. But I still notice the the community has not defined the techniques propperly and both of these get called cloaking. Here they are: 1. Detecting non human traffic and preventing it from from discovering the destination of an outbound link that a human experiences; instead the non-human visitor is redirected somewhere else; (back to the page; to a different page; to the homepage) 2. Masking the affiliate link; and also once clicked; making the external site look like it is hosted on the same website by preventing the url from changing. This is usually done by opening the affiliate page within an Iframe or using CURL to grab the contents of the affiliate page and print it. One of these could be renamed to something else; but for the most part they are both considered Cloaking; feel free to wordsmith!
Cloaking is basically when you show search engine bots one thing and humans another. Its generally regarded as Black Hat SEO technique. The reason people do link cloaking is because they believe that search engines have fingerprinted affiliate links and if the bots see them it will hurt there organic SEO rankings.
The original meaning of cloaking is to Cover, to hide, to disguise. This meaning helps us to understand the meaning of cloaking clearly for seo professionals. The deceptive practice of serving varying content to search engine spiders and humans with the purpose of tricking search engines into indexing content that is not visible to humans.
Note: it is not always used deceptively. Sites like alcohol and tobacco companies server different content to minors and adults. Search engines are sent to the adult-version of the site as that is where the bulk of the content is going to be. Content can be delivered based on the IP address or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. Once a user is identified as a search engine bot, a server-side script sends a different version of the web page, one that has different content that the visible page. The most common purpose though is deception. Intentions can be good though and some news sites even use cloaking to allow SE's to spider their content not usually presented without going through a registration page first.
Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page, or that is present but not searchable. The purpose of cloaking is sometimes to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed (black hat SEO). However, it can also be a functional (though antiquated) technique for informing search engines of content they would not otherwise be able to locate because it is embedded in non-textual containers such as video or certain Adobe Flash components.
Cloaking doesn't refer to affiliate links only. This can, and is, applied to all links with the intention of misleading the visitor. For example, the link appears as "http://www.mydomain.com/post1" but when clicked goes to a completely unrelated page/site.
Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index. Read More
Clocking: It refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines.
Cloaking is not SEO, its SED (Search Engine Deoptimization), because when they realize your doing it, they will de-index the site. [video=youtube;QHtnfOgp65Q]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHtnfOgp65Q[/video] Cheers James
Clocking is the masking of the sender's name and address in a email or distribution.Clocking is know as black hat seo technique.When a user will see different information on a web page compared to a search engine when they come and crawl the website.
Cloaking is black hat seo technique. It shows different content to user and different content to search engine crawler (bot). It may be harmful to your site.
Cloaking Is a Black Hat Work In SEO.It Is Totally Worng Way To Use.Its Show Another Page Crawler And Another For User.So Don,t Use This Way.