What is Cloaking in SEO?

[Cell]

[Merry]

Cloaking is a black hat technique. It refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines.

[Diwash]

Cloaking generally means to present different version of web page contents fromof 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.
Not always but in most of the cases, cloakingis also used to trick users to visit certain websites based on their description in search engines. For example a user searching for some product may click on a website in search engine based on its description and title but the final website will not be the one described in SERP's. It willbe a totally different one. Therefore, these practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by directing them to sites other than the ones they selected, and that provide content solelyfor the benefit of search engines should be avoided.

Different Cloaking Methods
IP address Cloaking - a method of presenting different contents based on determining IP addresses. e.g. Search engines with certain IP addresses will be shown a one version of a web page and all other IP addresses will be shown another version.
User-Agent Cloaking - a method of delivering different versions of a website based on User-Agent. e.g. Search engines and/or users using different versions of webbrowsers are served with different contents of a web page.
HTTP_REFERER Header Cloaking - if a user is coming from a certain website (e.g. clicking a link from search results or a website) they will be presented a different version of a website based on the HTTP_REFERER header value.
HTTP Accept-Language Header Cloaking - may be used to show different versions of a website based on a users web browser language without letting them for an option of language selection.
JavaScript Cloaking - users with JavaScript enabled browsers are shown one version while users with JavaScript turned off (like search engines) are shown another version of a website.
Finally, cloaking can be a dangerous thing sobe careful while using it.

[Christa]

Cloaking is a black hat technique involves using deceptive techniquefilehippos which presents the user with a different version of the webpage than that presented to the search engines.

[Brandon]

Cloaking is SEO technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that of the users browser and it is done through the use of IP addresses.

Cloaking is often used as spamdexing technique.

[Jack]

Cloaking is a black hat seo technique. Webmasters use this technique to show different different pages to crawler and visitors. In this technique visitor see a website page but on the same time search engine crawler see different page on the behalf of that page.