Cloaking

Cloaking is a method which gives search engines the impression that a website carries content that is different to what users actually see:

Visitors see a user friendly, visually appealing website which may, for example, contain little text and plenty of graphic or multimedia elements.
Search engines are limited in their ability to recognize graphic and multimedia elements, which is why they are presented with a different website (that has the same URL).


Most notably, this website contains text that is optimized for search engines. Cloaking is a violation of search engine guidelines. If a search engine recognizes cloaking it will penalize the website by permanently removing it from the search engine index. The website will no longer appear in search results.

A note of advice: if a website has been constructed differently to fit computers and mobile devices, this does not count as cloaking. Search engines will make allowances for websites with a mobile version.