Is cloaking good?

[erugheut]

Cloaking is primarily used as a technique to increase the ranking of a website. It can also be used to trick a user into visiting a site (and downloading the content)，cloaking keeps the web page content free of extra code and allows the highly optimised pages to be seen only by the search engines.

[Ben Stones]

You can bet Google will penalise your website when the search bots find out. It's cheating, plain and simple; and it would be unfair to genuine, high-quality websites and blogs to be listed below websites that use cloaking as a cheating method. So it seems natural Google and other search engines will penalise (or even blacklist) your website for website cloaking. I highly recommend you do not use cloaking for Search Engine Optimization purposes.

[antony05]

Definitely Good!
With cloaking, one can create two sets of pages: the first for search engine spiders, the second for regular human visitors. This enables retaining the good look and feel of the site for humans, while still being able to show highly optimized pages to the spiders and thus generate nice amounts of traffic from the search engines. Cloaking also prevents humans from seeing what kind of optimization techniques you are using and stealing your optimized pages.

[mischayahd]

"Cloaking generally means to present different version of web page contents from of search engines to search robots and human visitors based on their browser's user agent or IP address. It's a deceptive method used to cheat search engines in order to rank well for desired keywords. " - So this is why most pages are ranking even if they don't land on the proper page.

[seemasinghal]

Cloaking is a black hat technique of SEO. When a website have two different instance for search engines and visitors then it is called cloaking.

[Stan Paine]

Cloaking is basically a Black Hat SEO technique used to trick search engines into giving the relevant site a higher ranking mostly via false keyword optimization. For this reason, search engines consider cloaking to be a violation of their guidelines, and therefore, they delist sites when deceptive cloaking is reported.

[DPS Computing]

Hmmm, got to say that 'cloaking' (the name, not the technique) is a new one for me. However I agree. It's not good, will lead to you most likely being blacklisted from most search engines and isn't really playing fair is it? .

Due to all this, by using such a technique, you are likely to achieve exactly the opposite of what you intend .

[toursplanet]

dear cloaking is not a legal way.
mostly the search engine identify it and then your site has to face any kind of penality

[DPS Computing]

And there was me thinking that 'cloaking' was something only the Romulans and Klingons used....... .

[Brian]

My site got hacked years ago and lots of URLs and stuff was injected into my code and Google removed me from the search engine ...