What is Cloaking in SEO?

[jacksonperezy]

Cloaking is black hat way to hiding content. In this black hat trick, user shows different content to site and different one to Search Engine. So, we never use these types of techniques. Google really penalizes to those sites which unveils black hat techniques.

[JPinto]

Cloaking is pure spamgolightly anime-level naughty - feeding bots filtered, tuned content while real visitors get something else entirely. It's like catfishing Google with a fake profile.
Sure, it might pump your rankings for a hot minute, but it destroys credibility and trust once caught. Modern machine learning and behavioral signals make cloaking a relic, not a legit tactic.

[DigitalAacharyas]

"SEO cloaking is a black-hat SEO method when a site presents one set of information to a search engine and another to human users.
The aim is to trick search rankings by giving spiders a content full of keywords or optimized for them while showing something completely different or more user-friendly to humans. Some typical examples are IP-based cloaking, user-agent cloaking, and doorway pages.
Google regards deception very seriously and may impose sanctions on the violators, among which are both rating decreases and total elimination from the index. Students at the Digital Aacharya's Institute are taught not only to stay away from cloaking but also to use the correct SEO strategies which revolve around making content that is both user and search engine friendly."