If you’re like me, when you hear the word cloaking, you probably
think of Star Trek, right? You know those episodes when the
Klingons or Romulans employ their “Cloaking Device” to hide
their ship from the Enterprise and then they appear all of a
sudden and blast their unsuspecting, unaware Federation enemies
to kingdom come? Yeah, that’s a cloaking device! It’s too bad
they don’t make them small enough for a person! So, what is
cloaking in regards to a website? In SEO terms, cloaking is a
sleight-of-hand, deceptive tactic. The term ‘cloaking’ is used
to describe a Website that returns altered web pages to search
engines that are crawling them. For example, if a regular Joe
the Plumber were to visit a cloaked website, he will see and
experience something different from what the search crawlers
will encounter when they visit the same site. That is, the
crawlers will view a more relevant, optimized site! And it is
likely unreadable to human visitors. In short, the site is
viewed differently by people as opposed