What is the purpose of cloaking?

[SEO.Ninja]

Clocking is one of the black hat seo method if we do clocking in our website means google will banned our site. Some webmasters use to show the content of their sites to the search engine spider so they could rank higher for their keywords, and they show something else to the visitors.

[Newyorklimous]

It is Dark Hat SEO strategy which is not good for your site. It is the strategy in which the content provided to google crawl is different from that provided to customer's web browser.

[a4nuser]

Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page, or that is present but not searchable. The purpose of cloaking is sometimes to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed (black hat SEO). However, it can also be a functional (though antiquated) technique for informing search engines of content they would not otherwise be able to locate because it is embedded in non-textual containers such as video or certain Adobe Flash components. As of 2006, better methods of accessibility, including progressive enhancement, are available, so cloaking is no longer necessary for regular SEO.

[a4nuser]

Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page, or that is present but not searchable. The purpose of cloaking is sometimes to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed (black hat SEO). However, it can also be a functional (though antiquated) technique for informing search engines of content they would not otherwise be able to locate because it is embedded in non-textual containers such as video or certain Adobe Flash components. As of 2006, better methods of accessibility, including progressive enhancement, are available, so cloaking is no longer necessary for regular SEO.

[JeniAnderson]

-It is an unethical practice anda  kind of Blackhat SEO technique.
-It is the process of presenting the different content, what the user expects from the browser.

[a4nuser]

Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page, or that is present but not searchable. The purpose of cloaking is sometimes to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed (black hat SEO). However, it can also be a functional (though antiquated) technique for informing search engines of content they would not otherwise be able to locate because it is embedded in non-textual containers such as video or certain Adobe Flash components. As of 2006, better methods of accessibility, including progressive enhancement, are available, so cloaking is no longer necessary for regular SEO.

[dhcuaeweb]

The purpose of cloaking is to trick search engine and to rank high by black hat techniques but sooner or later search engine penalize those websites which use these kinds of tactics. The only safe way is to employ only white hat SEO methods.

[ravidubey]

Cloaking is a technique used to deliver the content on a Web page to a search engine in such a way that various content than what is delivered to a regular human user appears on the search engine. The goal of cloaking is to boost a web site search engine ranking on certain keywords.

With cloaking, the search engine and the user are literally not on the same page. Therefore, both the user and the search engine are being deceived.

[Shikha Singh]

Cloaking is a technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the users browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP adresses or the user agent of the user requesting the page.