Cloaking?

[gustaveeiffel]

These services, however, poses privacy issues as the user locations and queries are exposed to untrusted LBSs. Spatial cloaking techniques provide privacy in the form of kanonymity; i.e., they guarantee that the querying user u is indistinguishable from at least k-1 others, where k is a parameter specied by u at query
time. To achieve this, they form a group of k users, including u, and forward their minimum bounding rectangle to the LBS. The rationale behind sending an ASR instead of the distinct k locations is that exact user positions should not be disclosed to the LBS. This results in large ASRs with considerable dead-space, and leads to unnecessary performance degradation. Additionally, there is no guarantee regarding the amount of location information that is actually revealed to the LBS. In this paper, we introduce the concept of information leakage in spatial cloaking. We provide measures of this leakage.

[gilbertholdings]

cloaking is deceptive and definitely black hat.  i would stay away from it.  i have some background in artificial intelligence, which all the search engines use.  and i can tell you that they're going to get much better at catching this type of activity.  it's not worth the risk in my opinion,

[colin214]

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.

[prasadkunala]

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.

[VictorDesroches]

One of the newest features of many advanced Web sites is to display specialized content depending on various factors determined by the customers themselves. For example, on About, if you haven't visited the site in several months, you might get different content displayed in the navigation menus than you would if you regularly visited the site. Other sites use a technique called "Geo-IP" which determines your location based on the IP address you are logged into and displays ads or weather information relevant to your part of the world or country.
Some people have argued that this personalization is a form of cloaking, because the content that is delivered to a customer is different than what is delivered to the search engine robot. But the robot receives the same type of content as the customer, just personalized (if you will) to that robot's locale or profile on the system.

[TusharTaliyan]

The explanations above are good enough, to add to that, cloaking is an age old black hat technique, which is now severely penalised by Google for using.

[beatrixtuffy]

Cloaking is one types of black hat technique, in this technique online marketers creates 2 pages of a website one web page shows for users and second web page shows for search engine for indexing purpose.   

[bhushansharma]

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

[webcreations]

Cloaking is the process of providing the search engine with one set of web coding usually highly optimized while the Internet visitor receives a friendlier, more appealing web page.Cloaking is simply a technique in which, on a same url/address, search engine spider is served with a different version of web page as compared to the one which is served to the user. It is a Blackhat-SEO technique and is used to fool search engine. Geeks do this to gain unnatural rankings for irrelevant keywords.

[arpitapatel9689]

Cloaking is a very old technique to make the search engine crawlers fool. The user creates content with many keywords for the search engine. These pages are available only for search engine crawlers, normal user can't see these pages.