What is the definition of cloaking?

[sheena]

What is the definition of cloaking? Is this a spamming method just like keyword stuffing?

[offshoreSEO]

In Simple terms - Generating one page for spider and another for user is cloaking.

[Paz]

I don't think there is a universal definition. Matt Cutt's recent attempt at what constitutes cloaking was somewhat confusing.

I would say cloaking is serving up substantially different content to users and search engines.

[Monte]

Here is the defenition that a friend of mine uses:

Cloaking is one of the most nefarious (and effective) methods of spamming. Cloaking is essentially a redirect that chooses to direct known search engine spiders to one page, while sending human visitors to another. Each page is them optimized for its target audience without regard for the other party.

[lovely]

Cloaking has alot of defention, one of them is "The process by which your site can display different pages under different circumstances. It is primarily used to show an optimized page to the search engines and a different page to humans.

[trepxe-oes]

Cloaking is serving something different to search engines from what you serve to the visitors...

Yes, it's spamming.

[stephen]

cloaking-- one page for search engine and another page for user.

[offshoreSEO]

How to cloak a site any idea?

PS- I am not going to do..just wanted to know for info.

[Janna122003]

Cloaking is optimizing one site for search engine and redirect the users to other site. Good example is optimizing blog for search engine and redirect it to main site.

[allies]

Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the users' browser

[Paulin]

involves serving a specific page to each search engine spider and a different one to human visitors. In most cases, frowned upon by search engines.

[vikas.nagle]

Cloaking is something still google bots finds difficult to catch this probs..in clocking one page is for google bot and one page is for viewers....and sometimes you can notice it like when you click on url of any site for first few seconds a different page will flash and then u will be redirected to someother page....or sometimes you can view cached version and the Link location of the same website displayed in search result, both will be different.