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 users' browser.">Cloaking

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. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed.

Clocking in one of the unethical SEO techniques which can be defined as following:

 Simply put, cloaking is any process that involves presenting search engines with one set of information and the visitors with another. The copy presented to the search engines is highly optimized and hence the search but may rank it higher. When a visitor clicks on the link he is either redirected to a new location using CGI, JavaScript or Meta refresh tags or is tricked to enter a new page by using a mouse-over function.

Meta redirects are also used by webmasters today for legitimate reasons. For instance, a website owner who has changed his domain name would need his older visitors to automatically get to his new site using a redirect. This is where search engines face a challenge in identifying the legitimate sites from the illegitimate ones. But most search engines today are able to identify almost all kinds of cloaking techniques to a large extent.

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I hate to say it but Wikipedia is wrong, there’s many legitimate uses for cloaking and it’s not always used to deceive search engines.

Using IP delivery for Geo Targeting, user agent detection for page display to suit the browser, flash or javascript support to deliver the best page and the list goes on are all “cloaking” but legitimate.

Even Google uses cloaking.

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