What is cloacking?
Cloacking means cloaking in German. This is a method that is used in search engine optimization. If this variant is used, the crawler is presented with a different website to the user. Cloacking is intended to enable a better ranking.
What significance does cloacking have for SEO?
The cloacking method does offer the opportunity to improve rankings in the SERPs. However, it is also one of the unauthorized interventions to improve the ranking. Google does not like this and may even penalize a website if it has been exposed. This means that the website loses rankings or even disappears completely from the index. Good SEOs refrain from using unauthorized techniques and thus manage to boost a website's ranking.
When is it not cloacking?
Sometimes it is necessary to offer two different versions of a page. This is particularly interesting for the advertisers of mobile websites. The content should be displayed compactly and correctly on mobile devices. If the crawlers recognize a mobile website variant, this is not considered a cloaking method so that the page is not devalued. In this case, it is not an attempt to deceive, but a mobile website variant for greater user-friendliness.
