What is cloaking in SEO, and how does it affect a website?

[bigbenunited]

What is cloaking in SEO, and how does it affect a website?

[bigbenunited]

Cloaking in SEO is a technique where a website serves different content or URLs to search engine crawlers than it does to human visitors, with the intent of manipulating search rankings or hiding content.

Content variation: The server detects the requester (user-agent, IP ranges, JavaScript capability, referrer, cookies) and returns one version to search engines and another to humans.

URL variation: Presenting one URL to crawlers and redirecting users to a different page or domain.

Cloaking methods: User-agent sniffing, IP-based detection, JavaScript/Ajax-delivered content shown only to crawlers, meta or header tricks, and server-side conditional rendering.