Cloaking Hurts
Cloaking is essentially lying to get a better ranking with search engines. By cloaking your Web site you are deceiving the search engine providers and thus anyone who comes to your site from those search engines.
Cloaking is also frowned upon by most search engines. Google and other highly ranked search engines will remove your site from their listings completely and sometimes blacklist it (so that other engines don't list it either) if you are found to be cloaking. This means that while you might enjoy higher ranking for a time, ultimately you'll be caught and lose all your rankings completely.
Finally, cloaking doesn't work. Many search engines like Google use other methods that just what is on a page to determine the ranking of the page.
Or Does it?
If you engage an optimization firm that engages in cloaking, they will probably tell you many reasons why it isn't a bad thing.
- "The content is still relevant"
While it may still be relevant, it's still lying to your customers and providing them something different than they might have expected. - "We need to protect the HTML code"
With sites like mine all over the Web teaching people how to write HTML in various forms, protecting the HTML code is basically ridiculous. Most professional designers can imitate and improve a Web site just by looking at it. - "You won't get caught"
Yes, it can sometimes be difficult to prove that a site is cloaking content, especially if they are very sneaky, but doesn't make it right. The reality is, if your site gets too popular, it will get caught eventually. - "You can't compete without it"
If your site can't compete on its own merits, then perhaps it shouldn't be competing. Competition through shady business practices is an ethical slippery slope that can only lead to bigger and worse scams against your customers.
