Can Search Engines Really Detect Cloaking?

[TcM]

Well the title says it all. Can Search Engines Really Detect Cloaking?

[Jordan]

First I had to figure out what cloaking was:

Cloak: Something which hides, covers or keeps something else secret. (Cambridge Dictionary)

Cloaking: Also known as stealth, a technique used by some Web sites to deliver one page to a search engine for indexing while serving an entirely different page to everyone else. The search engine thinks it is selecting a prime match to its request based on the meta tags that the site administrator has input. However, the search result is misleading because the meta tags do not correspond to what actually exists on the page. Some search engines ... even ban cloaked Web sites. (Webopedia)

Web Site Cloaking and Search Engines - webreference.com

To answer your question I think it is possible. I know that on this forum I could allow the Google Bot to access pages that normal users could not. Experts-exchange.com does it. Google will scan and catch the entire page but if you click on the link all of the text is blurred out.

[kisna]

Nice info jordan.
I dont know whether search engine can detect it or not but I was looking at a site today and I found that cloaking is used to fake page rank.

[TcM]

No, not to fake PR that is something else.

[Lop]

Better be careful with this.

Google promises to Ban! (Presenting one webpage to the search engine spider, and another webpage to everybody else.)

[TcM]

No, no I am NOT and have NO intend in using this Black Hat Method. I don't need to, I already have a website showing on first page of Google so I know how to do this, but this time for my business directory the competition is bigger but still I dont need any black hat SEO to do it....

[Sionofdarkness]

I'm not sure cloaking is easily detectable, but if an SE ever finds out you're doing it, you're out.

[TcM]

Well after achieving what I achieved I will not use such hacks.. although I never panned to. It's not work the risk and all.

[PlayaSkater]

I'm sorry, but I wasn't really able to understand what that page was talking about. So what is cloaking?

[TcM]

Well is is creating a bunch of pages and show them to the search engines.. instead of your real content.