When you’ve spent time building the best website you can it’s only natural that you’ll want as many people to view it as possible. That’s how you get the exposure you need to achieve success. With this in mind, it’s very possible that you’ll be tempted at some point by methods of generating hits that seem just too good to be true. We’re here to inform you of advice from SEO specialists to be very careful when it comes to the methods you use, and not to get carried away by tricks such as cloaking.
Cloaking refers to a set of practises that involve deceiving programs sent by search engines to investigate your site. Cloaking can refer to a technique as obvious as including hidden keywords on your pages and by making the text invisible. Usually, however, cloaking is the process of ensuring that a different set of pages is delivered to search engine crawler programs than to real visitors to a site. There are many ways of doing this, but some unscrupulous search engine optimization services might tell you that the most effective method is to employ sophisticated IP delivery software. The way this works is often complex, but you should have a basic idea of what it means to use cloaking, and what the very negative results can be.So what are the 3 reasons we’ve put together for you to avoid cloaking at all costs?
The Repercussions of Getting Caught Can Be Serious
As an enterprise on the web you’re extremely dependant on search engines to bring visitors to your site. Search engines have the power and the right to punish you if you’re caught cloaking. So a good reason why you should avoid it is that it could ultimately deprive you of exactly what you need – hits to your site. Remember that a page that’s taken a long time to create will be rendered useless if no one can view it. So think about the potential financial losses that can result from using cloaking. It might not be so easy to just set up another business on the web, and you should take that into consideration.
It’s Just Not Good Practise
We all know how annoying it can be when you click on a link only to be directed to a site that has no relevance to your search. We feel like we’ve been tricked and it’s not pleasant. So remember that visitors to your site are not statistics but real people, and think about how you’d like to be treated before employing underhanded techniques such as cloaking. Remember that although search engine ranking is important, so is quality, and deception generally makes for a very poor quality site. Lace yourself in the shoes of a normal visitor to your site and try to view it objectively. If more people who create sites on the web did this it’s likely that substandard sites would less encumber the Internet.
Cloaking Will Damage Your Reputation
Search engines frown upon cloaking, so much so that through using it you could easily get a bad reputation that will hinder you and your future endeavours. When your site is up and running, you’re ready to start to reap the rewards of having spent time and effort making it and the last thing you want is to have to start from scratch. Think about what you stand to lose before resorting to cloaking.
Conclusion
We hope that our 3 reasons to avoid cloaking have proved informative, and that you will now be aware of potentially damaging consequences that will always overshadow short-term gains. Using cloaking techniques is a form of cheating that could make enemies of search engines and users alike, and as such it can have very serious consequences for enterprises on the Internet. Search engine reputation management is something you should take seriously, and there are reputable companies out there providing free search engine optimisation analysis which employ SEO experts who can help you. You should certainly be wary of anyone who advocates underhanded techniques such as cloaking. Remember that search engines are sophisticated and not easy to fool. Remember that visitors to your site are likewise able to discriminate between good and bad sites, and that cloaking makes for a poor quality site. You should be able to rely on good quality content and sound search engine optimisation techniques to bring visitors to your pages.