Cloaking & Black Hat SEO

Being upfront with your intentions

No matter how good your lipstick and foundation, Google can see through your thinly veiled disguise - far better to try to look good naked.

Seen it all before...

Google is like the ageing history teacher you had at your secondary school - coming across all cool and friendly, but if you push the boundaries too much you'll get a board rubber thrown at your head. If you (or your SEO contractor) think you've come up with a great way to trick Google, think again. It's been done, it's been spotted and anyone else who tries it will be penalised. Google hates cheats and the penalties can be severe.

Google means business

The highest-profile case of Google throwing its toys out of the pram has to be the German BMW site in early 2006. BMW.de had created a load of keyword-heavy 'doorway' pages that were only visible to the Googlebot; human users would be redirected to a different page. Now this goes against Google's rules:

'If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or "throwaway" domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google's index.'

Google's response? Well BMW.de was effectively removed from the Google index; they no longer existed as far as searchers were concerned. They were given a PageRank of 0, no cached versions of pages could be found and there was no mention of BMW.de anywhere within Google. Pretty harsh.

Cloaked content

Whilst you may well have a legitimate reason for having hidden content on your site, if you can avoid it, do. The Googlebot is pretty busy; all those billions of web pages to index and not enough hours in the day. The reality is that Google is not going to ask you questions about your intentions, it's just going to make a decision on the evidence presented. Most websites use hidden content for nefarious reasons and you'll be tarred with the same brush. At best, that page will suffer; at worst, the entire site will be penalised. If you're unsure, don't.


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