Out of many Black hat SEO techniques, cloaking is one of the prominent techniques used to get traffic by faking the search engine crawlers. To put it simple, giving a different page for search engine and an entirely different Flash page to the visitors for the same URL. Many affiliate marketers use this method to get traffic to their websites.
This technique is definitely spamming the search engines. Internet users will be searching for something and what they get is content unrelated to the searched keywords.
Many websites gain undue advantage from cloaking, but majority of cloaking websites are discarded by betrayed visitors.
So if caught by search engines definitely the websites are going to get banned. List of websites that suffered by using cloaking include big corporate companies like www.bmw.de. Cloaking will definitely spoil the reputation of the business to a great extent. Cloaking is not widely caught by the search engines, but the competitors can help the search engines.
Some of the methods used in cloaking are as follows:
