Unintentional Cloaking

Any one who’s knows anything about SEO will tell you that getting your site accused, or even suspected in cloaking is probably the worst thing you can do to your site when it comes to appearing in Google.

If Google consider a site as a cloaker it will most likely disappear from all search results, including a search query with the site’s full.

*If you don’t know what cloaking is visit our SEO dictionary for cloaking definition.

The problem is there are many reason for a site to be consider as performing cloaking which you are not even aware of.

These are some that I’ve bumped into so far. If you know any others you are welcome to add it in the comments below.

Random tag cloud:

Now I had experience with wordpress’s and joomla’s  random tag cloud widget, so I can only refer to them in this post. The random tags are making sure that different tags will appear in the same page for every server request for that page. The problem is that cloaking is checked by the string length in the page. If the string length is different with every server request than this might be suspected as presenting a different content for users and for search bots.

Random content plugin:

Also checked only in Joomla and WordPress, but I assume that is will result with the same outcome for other random content system. It has the same effect as the random tag cloud has on the page, (see above).

I have tried to get Google’s response for this but hadn’t have that much luck with this so far.

Sire Analytic code:

I have search for several alternatives for Google analytics and during my testing of some of these alternatives have bumped into some that causes a different string length in each server request for a page.

What to do If  I am suspected in cloaking:

Well, if you used the tools below and found that you get a different String length for bots and users I suggest you do the following:

1. Download some kind of a compare file software. There are platy our there that are free. I use ‘Beyond compare’.
2. Copy the page you’re checking source code
3. Refresh the page and copy it’s source code again.
4. Run the compare and see where the difference is.
5. Fix the problem by taking out what ever widget or plugin that causes the difference.
6. Test it again.

With all this said, I would like to emphasize that I’ve run these cloaking tools on sites like – amazon.com and got the same suspicious result, so I doubt there’s a real risk in this. But, on the other hand, Google might be using the string length on a web page as a first indication and than it comes back with some more testings. If your site is not totally Kosher, you might get a little slapping. So, in other words, if you don’t want special attention from Google, try to avoid things that will make Google check you with a microscope.

These are some free tools for checking your site for cloaking:

http://web-tool.org/cloak-check/cloak-check.asp

http://best-seo-tools.net/cloaking/

And this is the question I’ve opened in Google Web Master tools forum:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=317de42a132d5dcb&hl=en&fid=317de42a132d5dcb00047f29c6f5bcd4