Cloaking your site to destroy your Google ranking

Like many things to do with search engines, the buzz-words are spread about like everyone knows what's going on and understands it all, however I find many people haven't got a clue what some of these words are that us geeks use and they just serve to cause confusion.

So, I'm about to introduct another one to you that, if you choose, you can put to use almost immediately and get some cracking results in your search rankings - usually down.

Let's consider Google for a second. It's a cracking little search engine that provides much in the way of quality content that all us computer types really like to rave about. Some of that content is chock full of words, others have just tons of images on them. But what does Google like?

Well, there's no doubt that by far the best content for the search engines is text. It's the language of the web and it's what we use to communicate. Luckily for us, the English language is almost ubiquitous on the Internet now and it's the chosen method of communication for most people.

So it stands to reason that when we search for something, we do it using the English language. It also stands to reason, therefore, that Google will take what we type and turn this into something that can be returned back to the user as a bunch of relevant results.

To do this, it like to read websites that contain content - text content.

Even though there are plenty of research projects into how to analyse images for their content, it is quite a way off yet and so if we want Google to find something about 'pears' on our site, we'd better make sure the word 'pear' is there too.

But sometimes we like to have a bit of artistic license and we might create a site that is just full of images. How then, do we tell Google what our site is about? Google will look at the site and see images which it doesn't understand!

Enter the cloak

Cloaking is a method by which you show Google one page and all your users another. Clever huh?

This can be achieved because when a browser or any software requests a page from your site, it sends some data telling the web server who it. If Google has popped by, it tells us and so we can decide whether to send it something different.

If we are going to cloak our site, we'll therefore send it a page chock-full of our lovely keywords.

Easy, innit?

So why do this in the first place? What can possibly be gained by showing Google some different content and how does it affect my rankings?

Well, if you have a graphically intensive site then it could be an easy way of getting it indexed and letting the engines know what it's all about. Another great ploy is to stick in a load of keywords that you want to be found for but maybe you don't want others to know about.

For example, let's say I have a competitor called 'Acme websites' and I fancy getting some of their traffic. I could pop a page up that only Google sees that has lots of keywords pertaining to their products and services so in effect, it will think we're them.

With a bit of luck, typing in my competitor's name will show my site. Soooo easy....

But hang on, what are the cons to this? Well, as I said, this is all about getting banned and if you're one of the lucky/unlucky ones (to be honest, I've forgotten who's side I'm on), you'll get your site banned from the Google listings very quickly.

Often, never to return.

So there you have it! If you're looking to get your site dropped from the most popular index in the world, consider doing a bit of cloaking, it's a very effective method of destroying rankings.

However, if you consider it's best not to do this, maybe download our SEO training guide?