4. Cloaking
If you aren’t sure what cloaking means in search engine optimization, it’s an SEO practice through which your blog content or a specific page on your site is presented to the search bots in a way completely different from how they are displayed to searchers.
Cloaking is feasible, as the host can present content based on the search engine bot requesting the source page, or the HTTP header or Internet Protocol addresses of the searchers. Long ago it was a usual SEO practice but not in use any longer. It’s now a substandard practice in SEO and can get your site penalized.
What You Should Do
The best thing you could do is presenting only a single version of every page to both the searchers and the search engine bots. Also, make searchers see the difference between Advertisements and blog content.
After all, chances are, your site could be leveraging technologies which search bots might be unable to access. These technologies include Flash, JavaScript, and more. Thus, it is advisable to look into Google’s recommendations on the acceptable way to make such content and pages easy for both the searchers and search engine spiders to access.
One that I was aware of was the attempt to hide keywords and URLs in pages and posts. Unfortunately, I still see that practice used extensively and I am certain that it is hurting the chances for good SERPs for those who attempt that technique.
Throughout the course of a day, I visit many websites and view the page source for various reasons. That is where I discover those attempts to hide keywords and URLS. It happens more than one knows.
Since I am very naive about keywords, I have been using the SEO keyword section shown on the Pages section of my websites in the WordPress dashboard. It is there that I list what I think are relevant keywords.
By checking the page source of my live page on the Internet, I find the exact keywords that I placed in the keyword section....EXAMPLE:<meta name="keywords" content="camping in indiana,rv camping in indiana,tent camping in indiana">
Israel, by using the technique as described above, isn't that how it is supposed to work? Keywords........It is all very confusing to me.
Can you help to clarify the difference between the "keywords" listed in the <meta name> section of one's page source AND "keywords" one might use in their content when composing a blog post or page?
And are you saying that Google and other search engine bots are, for the most part, ignoring the keywords in the <meta name> section, but are instead searching through content itself for juicy and relevant keywords?
Thanks for the interesting and useful material in your post. You hear about these things and it was great learning more about them.
Like you said Google is so smart now it's hard to run any of these bad practices by them but I'm sure there are people who will still try.
It's the same old story if some of these people worked as hard honestly as they do dishonestly they would be a lot further ahead.
Have a good one,
Don