Cloaking Cloaking involves showing one piece of content to users and another piece of content to search engines. Websites that practice black hat SEO do this to make the content rank for a variety of terms that have nothing to do with their content. engine bots from finding the spammy content they are serving to users. It is acceptable to tailor your content for different user groups. For example, you might reduce the size of your site when someone is visiting from a mobile device. You could also change the language of a page based on the country someone is visiting from. Publishers like Forbes or Inc might change the ads that appear on a page to fund their content.
These examples are perfectly acceptable. As long as you are not estonia mobile database just changing the content that is displayed to search engine crawlers. While there are no hard and fast rules for what is and is not acceptable, my best advice is to ask yourself, does what you are planning to do solve a user's problem? If so, then it is acceptable. You should treat the search engine bots that crawl your site just like any other user. If you want to know how Google sees your site, you can use the fetch as Google tool and compare it to what a user sees.
Sneaky Redirects Redirects involve sending someone to a different URL than the one they originally clicked on. Black hat SEO uses redirects for purposes other than their intended purpose. As with cloaking, this can include redirecting search engine crawlers to one page and redirecting all other users to another page. Another example is redirecting a highly authoritative page with a lot of backlinks to another unrelated page just to improve its position in search results. 301 redirects pass most of the authority from one page to another.