Digital Marketing Mastery: Insights, Strategies, and Tactics for Success

Tag: cloaking and redirects

What is Cloaking?

Cloaking refers to a search engine optimization, or SEO, method used by webmasters to deceive search engine crawlers by presenting different content to the search engine than that which is presented to a user. Search engines such as Google’s consider this a violation of ethical internet practices, and there are consequences for doing it. Current digital marketing strategies must include ways to avoid cloaking, and SEO experts warn against it. When Googlebot, Google’s web-crawling device (that essentially ‘crawls’ the web and discovers new and updated pages to be added to Google’s index) finds cloaking, it considers it unethical and there are consequences. Therefore, it is necessary to be able to recognize cloaking and avoid it.

Types of Spam

Spam … the word has never been associated with anything all that tasteful. In the past, people knew spam as a precooked, canned meat made from pork and ham and some other stuff that garnered it a rather dubious reputation. Poor spam … how it was besieged with ‘mystery meat’ jokes about it showing up in kitchens and school cafeterias all over the country. Today, of course, spam is more associated with unwanted electronic messaging that internet users get bombarded with by the dozens or hundreds daily. Spam is what we now know as those ads that just don’t go away. So, what exactly is spam? How did it get its name? And what are the different types?